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Show HN: Make senders work to get into your inbox

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

#41

Post by netsharc »

saghm wrote: post #22
SilverBirch wrote: post #19

Isn't this the opposite of what I want? I don't want people willing to pay getting into my inbox. Those are the people who think they can get more from me somehow. Those are exactly the people I want to not be in my inbox.

I imagine the point is that if you make the price high enough, the ones who don't want it enough will go away, and the ones that do will want it enough that it's worth your while. You can set the price to whatever threshold is high enough that you'd find the money worthwhile.

Bill Gates wrote about paying to send you mail in his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" (yeah this is an old old idea). His expansion was that you could refund the sender's "stamp" if you consider their email worth your while.

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

#42

Post by AnimalMuppet »

4chandaily wrote: post #39
gosub100 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will get fewer of them because they all must pay a cost for each message sent. Spam works now because it's free.

Plenty of companies pay the post office to deliver paper spam to my mailbox each day. I don't want any of that, either. "Free" makes spam easier, but a cost doesn't prevent it.

No... but paper spam actually pays less than a regular letter. Make it pay more, and the amount will go down. Not to zero, but down significantly.

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

#43

Post by reticulates »

As others have said, this is an age old idea that has been tried dozens of times and sometimes with very big financial backing (there was another attempt on HN just a few months ago). My personal view is that this idea is fatally flawed and will never work. That said, every idea sucks until it doesn’t, sometimes it’s all about the idea in the moment, maybe right now is finally the moment for this idea? So don’t be discouraged by all us naysayers, maybe your fresh perspective in this moment could make the difference.

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

#44

Post by cwnyth »

Kwpolska wrote: post #25
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 haven't received any AI spam. You don't need an LLM to spam people. Good spam filters should be enough to get rid of spam without annoying people who email you.

It's not my email that has an unbearable spam issue. I can't take all the incessant phone spam anymore, though. Even setting it to go straight to voicemail, the calls are relentless. They've switched to texts now, too.

Miserable lot that serves no purpose in life.

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

#45

Post by sigmoid10 »

loumf wrote: post #32
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 get about 10 AI generated spam emails a day that get through my spam filter. It takes about 10 seconds to block and mark as spam. I barely read the first three words of each.

Do you often sign up for new services using your actual email? In gmail, I get spam in my primary mailbox maybe once every few months, usually after I've signed up for something. After marking mails as spam a few times, they are usually sent to the spambox automatically and I have a tidy primary inbox again for a long time.

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

#46

Post by cyphar »

djb proposed Internet Mail 2000 back in the early 2000s as an attempt to solve this kind of problem without micropayments[1].

As others have said, a lot of the useful emails I get are still ones where the sender probably wouldn't have paid to send them. IM2000's fairly old-school-yet-elegant approach would probably lead to a better outcome too.

[1]: http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

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

#47

Post by ralferoo »

gosub100 wrote: post #30
SilverBirch wrote: post #19

Isn't this the opposite of what I want? I don't want people willing to pay getting into my inbox. Those are the people who think they can get more from me somehow. Those are exactly the people I want to not be in my inbox.

You will get fewer of them because they all must pay a cost for each message sent. Spam works now because it's free.

Physical mail costs money, but 80% of the mail I receive is junk mail that somebody has paid to send me.

Of the 20% of mail that is useful to me, it's still pretty much all just from corporations who have decided to send me a physical letter even though they have my e-mail - e.g. the water company sends me some brochure to somehow justify how much money they're charging by breaking down what they spend all their money on etc...

I get almost zero "real" mail from actual people nowadays. Now it costs £1.80 to post something first class and 91p second class, real mail is basically limited to birthday and Christmas cards. I myself send so few letters, than I still have a couple of stamps in my wallet that I technically bought 6 years ago when they cost 35% the current price (although they were replaced with barcode versions by sending them in to Royal Mail).

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

#48

Post by st_goliath »

Your post advocates a

    ( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

    ( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
    (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate uses would be affected
    ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
    ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
    (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
    (X) Users will not put up with it
    (X) Microsoft will not put up with it
    (X) The police will not put up with it
    ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
    (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
    (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
    ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
    ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for

    ( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
    (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
    ( ) Open relays in foreign countries
    ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
    (X) Asshats
    ( ) Jurisdictional problems
    (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
    ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
    (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
    ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
    ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
    ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
    ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
    (X) Extreme profitability of spam
    (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
    ( ) Technically illiterate politicians
    ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
    (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
    ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
    ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

    (X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
    ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
    ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
    ( ) Blacklists suck
    ( ) Whitelists suck
    ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
    ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
    ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
    (X) Sending email should be free
    (X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
    ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
    (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
    ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
    ( ) I don't want the government reading my email
    ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

    (X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
    ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
    ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

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

#49

Post by ghaff »

sigmoid10 wrote: post #45
loumf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get about 10 AI generated spam emails a day that get through my spam filter. It takes about 10 seconds to block and mark as spam. I barely read the first three words of each.

Do you often sign up for new services using your actual email? In gmail, I get spam in my primary mailbox maybe once every few months, usually after I've signed up for something. After marking mails as spam a few times, they are usually sent to the spambox automatically and I have a tidy primary inbox again for a long time.

Especially if you signed up for something, rather than just unsubscribing marking it as spam is a dickish move given that it has the potential of that mail also being filtered for people wanting to receive it.
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