BoxBe Courtesy Messages Discontinued

By Wesley Fryer On May 17, 2009 · · Add Comment

After signing up for the free BoxBe email filtering / mail screening service recently, I didn’t realize lots of folks (maybe everyone) who was emailing me was receiving a message FROM me via BoxBe saying that I use their service.

Evidently this is something users agree to by default when they sign up for the service, unless they change their personal settings. I’ve made those changes tonight, so no one should receive a BoxBe “courtesy notice” from me.

I suppose this is effective marketing on BoxBe’s part, but I certainly don’t like it. I think the sign-up process should make it more clear that unless a user TAKES ACTION, BoxBe is going to send out a ton of email messages as “courtesy notices” on the user’s behalf. I’d be even happier if this was not done at all, but I can understand why BoxBe wants to send out these messages: This is good marketing for them. Unfortunately I guess I just didn’t read “the fine print” when I signed up for an account. It’s good they permit users to disable this “feature.”

Hopefully the practice of sending out “courtesy notices” from BoxBe is now at an end for my own email account.

Thanks Sylvia Martinez for the heads-up on this. 🙂

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