Most of us would love if the email service that we use prioritize the messages that we receive. There are some service providers who perform this based on the information that they pull out from the contact list. But the problem is that those providers that are not leading service providers in the industry and I don’t wish to share my personal information with those start-ups.

So all I can do is to code my own filter that runs locally in my computer. In fact, I did one in Java. In this case, the issue was that it works only if I use mutt or thunderbird in my Linux based system (Of course, by doing some minor tweaks we can enable support for MS Outlook as well). But if you access the email by logging into the website of the service provider, this will not work.

All I need is to prioritise my  emails (say, I would like to have the emails sent to a mailing list to be listed with least priority) and I want to offer a challenge-response test to a person who contacts me for the first time (so that I know that he is a real person and not a spam bot). I can do that later if I could use a service with captcha like system for the incoming emails. (Captchas are random words displayed to the user to prove that he is human – like the one shown below).

Well, now I have found a reliable service – Boxbe. This service allows you to prioritise the emails and offers even a captcha service! The interesting thing is that though you will have signup for the service it is reliable (has received acclaim from all around the world and has been features in leading publications like The NewYork Times) and works with leading service providers like Gmail (Google mail), Yahoo mail, AOL mail etc. It also supports if you are using your own personal email, attached to your site. It helps to ensure that the emails from those in your ‘special contact lists are delivered to your inbox)

It allows you to import you contact list (say Gmail, MS Outlook etc) and select your ‘trusted friends’. These emails will be displayed with more priority. Another striking feature is that it completely integrates into the existing web based service provided by your email service provider.

Here is a video ,created by the developer, which explains how the service works:

After enabling Boxbe, your existing email account will show a new label (if you are in Gmail) or a new folder (if you are in Yahoo mail). This will act more like a waiting list. You can still read the mails in the folder (and you may note that you don’t have to visit Boxbe website for reading these emails) from your email account itself. You can add the people who are in that ‘list’ to your ‘trusted friend list’. Once you approve those email address, the email from these users will start showing in your inbox.

Apart these, you can also see a Spam mark next to your email headers. Lower the mark, better the mail. This means that if you see an email with spam mark shown as 9/10, then it is likely to be a spam. Hence you can improvise the spam filter provided by your existing service provider.

Also, the Boxbe allows you to signup for an @boxbe.com email address which you can use as a ‘public email address’ and you can add ‘forward rules’ for this email address. Based on these rules, emails received by this email id will be forwarded your existing email address.

Emails will be directed to Inbox directly if it satisfies any one of the following conditions:

• if the sender there in your ‘trusted friend list’
• if the sender passes the captcha test
• if the ‘junk rule’ (set by the user) is obeyed (say, it is under the junk ranking)

Thus the system creates almost a junk-free email!