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Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

captchainbox.com

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Re: Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

#11

Post by msdz »

Hi Felix,

I know the situation here in Germany kinda sucks for non-incorporated founders (or simply any website administrator trying to commercialize anything [0]), but gating imprint/Impressum behind a login wall makes it not legally compliant. It needs to be easily accessible from anywhere (that’s why most people place it in the footer), without auth or signup; and if you put it behind either Outlook or Gmail logins, you may as well just not include it at all (realistically, who’s gonna complain if you don’t include “made in Germany”).

All the best for your project, though!

[0]: Personally I’ve given up and just include my name and address on the public web in projects now, which I guess is what the federal government wanted to achieve.

Re: Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

#12

Post by felixdoerp »

welder wrote: post #9

I built this for my company email, but instead of sending captchas it puts non-customer emails into a folder that I never read. Emails from customers and contacts get into my inbox, and get labeled based on their support subscription level. Most tech companies I've seen gate and filter customer support on web not email, then only sales and external interfacing employees need external emails and the bigger problem is…

valid point and for personal inboxes I would also not think this makes a lot of sense. Yet, for many businesses or people in these businesses, the amount of inbound is just not manageable at this point.

Re: Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

#13

Post by dwedge »

felixdoerp wrote: post #5
dwedge wrote: post #3

This mostly assumes that the only one benefiting from the email exchange in the sender. If that's the case, just close your email account. A few years ago I emailed a local freelancer I'd met in person, because I had a client asking for coding (which was more his bag than mine). I got an automated response that he was using something like this, with a link to some third party service to fill out a form and click a ca…

valid point. I feel for many people the amount of inbound is just not bearable anymore with ai. Yet these people cannot close their account, either. This is basically an idea to increase the inbound friction for exactly these people. do you have a take on how one could upp the relevancy of emails so that people can actually manage their inbound? Or any other open channel that is getting flooded, for that matter?

I also realised a while ago that most emails are just transactional now (password resets, how well did we do the thing you paid us to do?), so I do similar to you without the sender input and it more or less works. Breaks down like this:

- Nobody gets into my inbox unless whitelisted address. Instead of fighting spam and blacklisting, I know my inbox is always from someone I want to hear from.

- Every other email goes through spam assassin (which is getting worse) and then into a folder called Transactional (and if it makes a mistake, I add to the whitelist)

- I have another folder SpamAssassin where I move spam, and it gets pushed back through sa-learn

- Finally, I have a cronjob that goes through the email in Transaction and looks for subjects, senders, sending domains or to addresses that have a) been received at least 5 times and b) are only in the spam folder.

So kind of the same idea as you. But I think I'd feel really pretentious using this system and assume that quite a lot of people just rolled their eyes and ignored the rejection.

Re: Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

#14

Post by felixdoerp »

msdz wrote: post #11

Hi Felix, I know the situation here in Germany kinda sucks for non-incorporated founders (or simply any website administrator trying to commercialize anything [0]), but gating imprint/Impressum behind a login wall makes it not legally compliant. It needs to be easily accessible from anywhere (that’s why most people place it in the footer), without auth or signup; and if you put it behind either Outlook or Gmail login…

good point! will adjust :)

Re: Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

#16

Post by felixdoerp »

dwedge wrote: post #13
felixdoerp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

valid point. I feel for many people the amount of inbound is just not bearable anymore with ai. Yet these people cannot close their account, either. This is basically an idea to increase the inbound friction for exactly these people. do you have a take on how one could upp the relevancy of emails so that people can actually manage their inbound? Or any other open channel that is getting flooded, for that matter?

I also realised a while ago that most emails are just transactional now (password resets, how well did we do the thing you paid us to do?), so I do similar to you without the sender input and it more or less works. Breaks down like this: - Nobody gets into my inbox unless whitelisted address. Instead of fighting spam and blacklisting, I know my inbox is always from someone I want to hear from. - Every other email goe…

this sounds really similar to how the tool works and processes emails, too.

Would you feel this would be more helpful if the tool just silently manages the emails and does not send any replies to the original sender then?

Re: Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

#20

Post by felixdoerp »

gnashxyz wrote: post #18

Relatedly, a precursor to the Bitcoin proof of work algorithm, Hashcash [0], was created to solve this same problem. This feels like a cool modern iteration of it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

super interesting - did not know!
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