About a month ago, I discovered Boxbe… by accident. It was one of those rare “wow” moments that happens when you run across something that you haven’t seen before and that you think has unlimited potential.

What is Boxbe? The Web site, http://boxbe.com/ says that you can think of it as “e-mail by invitation,” where you can manage the messages that you receive in your inbox. You can allow certain senders permission from the get-go, but other people have jump through an encryption loop before their message gets through. In a nutshell, that means you won’t have to worry about junk mail getting through spam filters or worry about legitimate mail getting filtered out as junk.

Today, November 29, 2007, is a big day for Boxbe, according to Boxbe’s official press release:

With the release of Boxbe’s new service, users of Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, and Gmail can now create an ‘email guest list,’ which ensures that they receive messages only from those people who matter to them.

BoxbeThis sounds great, doesn’t it? If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering what the catch is and how much money Boxbe is going to cost me each month. Sure, spam is annoying, but I’d rather delete junk mail than have to part with even a morsel of my hard-earned paycheck. Well, skeptics, Boxbe’s service is free. If you don’t believe it, drop on over to Boxbe.com and see for yourself. For a sneak peek at Boxbe, view these screenshots.

I had the opportunity to talk to Thede Loder, the founder and President of Boxbe, about the service and the company’s recent announcements. To hear more about Boxbe, listen to the podcast.