I’ve been using Receipt Mail-In since we first started offering it. I have over a thousand receipts in my own account now, as I send in about 50 every month to be scanned and uploaded.

With all these paper receipts in my account, it’s certainly cool to watch my statistics grow and evolve over time. For some reason, though, with all the paper receipts I got to play around with, I realized that I hadn’t really be shopping online all that much recently.

So then I thought: might as well make an impulse buy. And to Amazon I went. I bought a couple of books and gave them my Shoeboxed email address. They came right into my account, right along with all my paper receipts. Voila!

This was the original feature of Shoeboxed when we launched our website last summer, but it’s still my favorite.

So remember, every time you buy something online, tell the store that your email is address is your username @shoeboxed.com. The receipts that they send you will come right into your Shoeboxed account. Follow up emails that they attempt to send you at your Shoeboxed email address, will be separated out from your receipts in Your Shopping Inbox inside your Shoeboxed acccount.

Old email receipts that you are hiding in your email client can be forwarded to your Shoeboxed account as well. Though it may be kind of a pain to search for all those old receipts in your cluttered inbox, just think: This is the last time you’ll ever have to do it, because Shoeboxed will organize them for you.

Back in July when we were testing Shoeboxed before we launched it to the public, we thought it would be necessary to have someone sign up for a bunch of mailing lists from online stores.

Well, for some reason, I was chosen to take on the wonderful chore of finding the most popular online retailers and asking them to send me emails whenever they wanted to. Luckily, I had to given them my Shoeboxed email address to test out the system, so they were being diverted from my personal Gmail account.

Since July, though, I have accumulated more than 1500 emails from online stores. I get almost daily emails from 3-4 stores. I get emails from stores I never signed up for. I once showed my account to a potential user and found a Victoria’s Secret email sitting in my account. Then I had to explain. “You see, back in July, we were testing…”

Anyway, diverting emails away from your personal account is great, because it keeps your inbox free from the 3,000 emails you might get from online stores is a calendar year. This has always been one of my favorite parts about Shoeboxed, and sometimes it takes a back seat to some of the new features we have been rolling out, like uploaded receipts, improved receipt-reading algorithms, and Shoeboxed Mail-In. But I just wanted to give it a little love here on the blog, and remind everyone what a daily convenience your Shoeboxed account may be quietly giving you.

In my 21 years of life, I’ve bought ONE t-shirt from J.Crew online, but in the last two weeks, I’ve received the following e-mails from their online store:

Last Chance for free shipping
Presenting… free shipping
New at Crewcuts… Seaside Chic
Hello sale…
New men’s must-have: the cardigan

Let’s recap why this is annoying. First of all, I don’t need a cardigan, and neither do the rest of you guys out there. Second of all, I’m in Germany, and J. Crew doesn’t even ship here, so I couldn’t care less what their non-existent shipping costs. Third, CrewCuts is the children’s clothing line at J.Crew, and unless there’s something I don’t know about, I’m not buying baby clothes for a while. Though I do like J. Crew otherwise, I hate getting all these irrelevant e-mails in my inbox.

But now that Shoeboxed is up and running, I went to jcrew.com and modified my account settings. In about 20 seconds, I changed the e-mail associated with my account to my @shoeboxed.com address. Now all these store notifications come into my Shoeboxed account. I also one-click-unsubscribed from J.Crew e-mails, causing them to only show up in my Shoeboxed account, and to stay away from my personal inbox.

I still like J. Crew, and I still get those e-mails in my Shoeboxed account, but now I don’t have to have them in my inbox, where all my important personal communications are. My personal inbox is breathing easier, and so am I.

I also did this for all the other stores where I shop (and the stores that send me e-mails even though I don’t buy stuff from them) and changed out my e-mail address.

So now, whenever I’m in the mood to shop, I just go to my Shoeboxed account, see all my new e-mails, check out all the places that are having sales or recommending new products, and start shopping from there.

Oh, Google. The word just gives you a warm and fuzzy feeling inside. It’s always there, always ready to help. The friend you never had, but always wanted. I was content with just a search engine, but Google just continues to pump out more and more web applications. It’s what makes life worth living.

Gmail is one of the company’s most successful offshoots with an unmatched cult following (excluding the beanie baby craze of ‘96, of course). And as with many of its projects, Google incorporates useful applications into its web-mail service. Specifically, its spam prevention puts both Yahoo and Hotmail’s services to shame. Another fun feature is how attachments automatically open with the mail - when I get family photos from my mom, I have no choice but to look at them. Sweet.

But regardless of the improvements, spammers have worked against Google to find a creative way into our email accounts! Temporarily set-back by Google’s innovative technology, spammers changed the way they send junk mail. Back in 2005, 99% of spam was sent in simple text format. As Gmail filters were able to cut down on the unwanted messages its users received, spammers began embedding spam messages into emails as attached images. And just like mom’s photos, they show up when the mail is opened! The convenience of having attachments load effortlessly was hindered.

Since Gmail technology cannot yet decipher a lot of spam that is encoded as an image, users’ mailboxes grew cluttered once again. Since 2005, this type of spam has grown from 1% to 21%. With no way to stop this form of junk mail, users can only press the “Report Spam” button above the e-mail.

Looks like Shoeboxed has one up on Google. Whoa. That’s awesome.

A few weeks ago, Mo described how people have begun to create temporary, disposable email addresses to combat the rising threat and annoyance of email spam. It shocked me to learn that people are willing to go to such lengths to avoid spam. First, people have to find the website that supports this process, then they have to actually create the email address, and then of course they have to repeat the process a few weeks later. I have enough trouble remembering my single email address that has remained constant for the past three years - the idea of changing email addresses and passwords every couple of weeks terrifies me. (As a side note, I also used to believe that simply not checking my email was an effective countermeasure for spam. Let me tell you, it is not. I currently have 11,259 messages in my inbox.) But I digress. Learning how much trouble people are willing to go through to avoid spam inspired me to find out a little bit more about the spam “industry.” Here are some interesting factoids that I stumbled across:

• 85 billion spam emails were sent out every day of 2006. That comes out to 32,850,000,000,000 (almost 33 trillion, if I counted my zeroes right) spam messages sent in 2006.[link]
• The average internet user receives 5,475 spam emails every year. In other words, that’s 15 pieces of spam a day, every single day. Even worse: that number is constantly increasing.[link]
• Currently, over 83% of all emails are spam.[link]
• When grouped by continents, spam comes mostly from Europe (35.1%), Asia (33.4%), and North America (22.9%).[link]
• One of the reasons that spam continues to be global annoyance is the fact that a small number of Internet service providers (ISPs) knowingly sell their services to spam companies. Right now, the networks hosting the most spammers are verizon.com, att.net, and vsnlinternational.com.[link]
• Believe it or not, spamming is technically legal in the United States, provided it follows a few guidelines set by the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.[link]

All in all, I would have to say that these statistics are pretty scary. The fact that there are literally billions of pieces of spam being sent out every day makes me glad that Shoeboxed will be there to help sift through it. Maybe now I’ll actually start checking my email.

Lord Jeffery once said, “A good name, like good will, is got by many actions and lost by one.” Today, this statement rings true to web users everywhere, as “phishers” impersonate a vast number of reputable businesses, including PayPal, eBay, Inc., Bank of America Corporation, and Citibank. According to Phishtank.com, an organization committed to eliminating phishers, around 77,709 phishes were sent out in April 2007. With one click of a button, an unsuspecting user can give away their precious information to criminals! It is important to try to protect yourself from getting hooked by their extremely enticing and advanced baiting techniques.

Phishing is the illicit act of luring internet users to give up their valuable personal and account information. The first phishers started out stealing AOL users’ passwords in the 1990s by sending out instant messages to unsuspecting victims. When they got passwords, the phishers gained access to all their victims’ account information. Phishers now use a variety of techniques, including fraudulent emails, pop-ups, links, websites, and phone calls.

The damage caused by phishers ranges from cluttered email inboxes to financial failure. Estimates suggest that between May 2004 and May 2005 computer users lost approximately $929 million USD. For businesses the picture is even worse, as US businesses lose $2 billion USD a year because their clients fall prey to phishers.

To combat phishers, companies are coming up with creative solutions. Some companies use user specific details when corresponding with clients. For example, the Bank of America Corporation sends the client’s image on any emails or messages. The goal of such incentives is to help users differentiate between legitimate correspondences and false ones. With the launch of Firefox 2.0, an open-source browser, Firefox included Google, Inc.’s anti-phish software. This software alerts users when they are on a phisher’s site (see photo). As the presence of phishers climbs, more and more companies are having to take action against them.

As for now, here are some tips you may find useful to fight phishermen:

• Do not click on the links of any unexpected e-mails alerting you that you need to confirm your billing information.
• Look for multiple misspellings.
• Look for the “lock” icon, which indicates a secure site, on the browser’s status bar.
• If you’re unsure about something, contact the company in question.

If you do smell something phishy, you can visit antiphishing.org or phishtank.com to report it.

It’s exciting to wake up to an email inbox with ten new messages. As often as this may happen, chances are that most, if not all, will be spam. Statistically, 8 of 10 emails received are spam. This has caused users to create disposable, or temporary, email addresses.

There are about ten frequently used websites where you can create a disposable email address. These temporary email addresses forward mail into your inbox, and are typically used for online purchases, blogs, wikis, and other non-personal contacts. Once spam starts to fill your inbox, you can cancel the address and start a new one.

One of the more prominent sites for disposable email addresses explains their purpose:

Most websites require you to register by providing them your email address before you can access their services. Usually this is not a problem, but some sites will sell your personal information, including your email address to other companies for commercial solicitation. This is when you start receiving SPAM.

With shoeboxed, you can use your personal email address for everything, and rest assured that spam will not be delivered to your inbox. Forget managing multiple email accounts, we will keep your personal mail personal.

After our launch, when you wake up to ten messages in your inbox, you will feel love, not hate. Click here to register with shoeboxed.com.

Never open suspicious email. It seems like a no brainer, but people do it all the time. If you don’t know who the email is from, you shouldn’t even bother looking at it—no matter how enticing the subject may look. If you’re not careful, you can end up with a virus that destroys your computer. These viruses can multiply and be sent to everyone in your address book, potentially infecting your friends’ computers as well.

Be careful forwarding mass emails and chain letters. I know it’s fun to forward funny emails to your family and friends. But people often forget that their personal email address is published at the top of the forwarded email and will most likely end up in many inboxes across the world. And once you send that message, the fate of your address is out of your hands. Eventually after making its way through email lists, online forums, and news groups, your address will end up in the hands of a spammer. They’ll know that your email address is valid, and you will be spammed right away!

Don’t unsubscribe. It’s a trap. Sometimes there is an unsubscribe message on the bottom of spam. If you didn’t know any better, you would want to click on the link and unsubscribe from the emails. After all, you’re sick of them clogging your inbox, right? Clicking on a link in a spam message tells the spammer that your email address is valid, and you will likely receive more spam in the future. Shoeboxed.com’s innovative service will block your spam and allow you to reliably one-click unsubscribe from all spam mail.

Don’t post your email address online. It’s just a bad idea. Spam software is designed to crawl websites, forums, and other online groups looking for email addresses. If it is absolutely necessary that you provide your email address, don’t write joe@gmail.com, write joe(at)gmail(dot)com.

Don’t give out your personal email address unless you know how it will be used. This seems intuitive, but it’s becoming harder and harder these days to predict how much junk mail any given company will send you. As I mentioned in an earlier article, even in-store purchases will soon come with digital email receipts. Shoeboxed.com will make sure that you never have to think about this ever again—your inbox should be for personal emails only!

If you’re worried about protecting you and your computer from spam, shoeboxed can help. Click here to be notified when we launch our innovative website.

Spam is such a crazy thing. This year, spam messages are expected to overtake human-issued emails—that’s right, the average person will receive more corporate mailings than person-to-person emails in the year 2007. That’s pretty scary, especially since spam has become increasingly sophisticated. I find it more and more difficult to decipher between what is safe and what is not. I guess I have some decision rules that I live by — when the email is sent from someone with numbers in their name, I usually steer clear. But can I trust emails sent to me from online stores? How do I know who to trust?

Recently, spam volumes have been increasing faster than expected due to the use of image-based spam. Rather than using traditional written text, these emails contain large image files that include the spam advertisements. This means that most of these messages are able to bypass spam filters and end up in your personal inbox. By the end of the year, more than thirty-five percent of spam will be in the form of an image—and as of now, no one has been able to create a product that would universally block these messages from reaching your inbox.

Until now, the team at shoeboxed.com was just as frustrated as everyone else. So we made it a priority to find a solution. When shoeboxed.com launches, we will eliminate spam from your inbox for free. Image files, non-image files—our service will take care of it all. For the first time, you’ll have total control over your inbox.

If you want to be the first to know when you can prevent all spam for free, click here and give us your email. Don’t worry, I promise we won’t spam you.