Possible solution to PG's frighteningly ambitious idea for email overload (opens in new tab)

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 ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) 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 ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) 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 ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) 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 ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) 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!

I think this idea might have potential actually for non famous people. Besides the market for famous people simply isn't that large and suffers anyway from becoming impractical if it were successful. (Unless you raise the price per email to an objectionable level).

But consider whether people would agree to receive email if they were paid per message. All the emails would be pitches and the price paid for the message would depend on a bidding system tailored to both the end user and the person selling something (or the advertiser).

Arbitrary examples:

Car dealer wants to send you an email: .02 Supermarket: .04 Local plumber: .10 Life insurance salesman: .15 PC Mall .01

The idea being that people agree to accept and read spam (maybe you have to click to show you read the message which would have to be only a certain length) to get the money.

Add: While this sounds like opt in it's not. This is money per message. You have to read the messages in order to collect the fee for reading.

Would a life insurance salesman pay .15 per recipient to know that his email had a good chance of being read? I think he would.

There are many things that I like about this idea. But who benefits from this? I don't think the overloaded. I think the person selling.

But let's take a use examples.

In the case of someone like Fred Wilson, he will return your email if it is something that he is interested in [2] and not return it if he isn't interested. Even if you are on his "A or B" list. (And even if you are on his A list he won't necessarily take the time to read or understand your entire email.[1])

So your idea seems to be "Fred will know that I (a nobody) have paid .50c or $5 and therefore be more likely to read my email. After all you are not pitching this idea as a replacement, merely an additional way to get someone's attention. The price has to be below other methods (a billboard on the 101) or express mail.

So this is not going to solve the email problem of an important person. It's only going to put certain email, and this is important, hopefully with a better chance of getting read.

The problem is it really doesn't solve any problem for Fred. He will still get a shitload of email. All he will see is that 15 or 20 messages a day people decided to pay to have him see their message. So this is really a benefit to the sender not to the recipient (like Fred anyway).

[1] I've gotten responses in 5 minutes and in 5 hours and I've gotten no response. Frequent occurrence. Generally if you don't get a response w/i 24 hours you aren't going to get a response because it's not something he wants to deal with.

[2] In order to even begin to approach doing an idea like this you would have to see the mail flow of a power user like Fred. My guess is that he gets so many emails of so many purposes (companies he's funded asking questions, people he has met, pitches, Michael Bloomberg, other VC's) that it would simply not be practical to begin to give out an email address or post an address where people have to pay to email him.

Rather than comment or criticize the idea as a whole, there's one issue that stands out to me --

Read receipts are a terrible idea, and 'percentage read' is also a terrible idea. What's to stop people from getting an assistant to click through each message -- or, more likely, download a script that does the same?

Surely somebody already said this and there are thousand of reasons of why it won´t work, but what about an inbox only allowed by recommendation. Only the people you already have in your contacts can give access to your inbox (or at least to the important inbox). All the non recommended mail could go to a bulk inbox, just checked now and then(not your workhorse inbox). That way you make the email work just as society works, some one you know introduces you to the people you want/need to know. Maybe it isn´t enough filter for PG, but could help to less busy people keep the inbox less crowded.

I think this could work, if implemented as part of the current e-mail system. You could add a server that intercepts e-mails and if the user is not on the white list, or hasn't paid/registered for a particular pay service, then it could bounce the e-mail with a notice telling the sender to sign up. That would solve the initial problem of not having any users as well.

I think this is a brilliant idea, and someone will eventually do it.

Richard Branson already organises meetings where you donate a few thousands to a charity of his liking in order to have access to a dinner and a chat with him. Why wouldn't he add a few dollars to charity per email AND mitigate his inbox problem a at he same time.

Also I love the idea of an automated system to adjust the asking price as f(total unread messages)

Such a scheme would solve the problem of getting unsolicited, unimportant email. But I suspect that these kinds of messages are not the problem. The problem is that busy people are just getting too much good quality email. People are just overloaded: they have too many demands on their time, their energy, and their money. Email overload is part of the larger problem of too little margin.

Attaching prices to emails could help a person that is too busy if the recipient had to pay. A person has a limited amount of time and energy during a day to do email. If prices were attached to emails, it might be easier to recognize the cost of an email. Prices might help the email user to ask questions like:

"If I read and respond to this email, this will consume 10% of email budget for the day. Is it worth it?"

"This daily email that I'm getting from X is consuming 5% of my total email budget for the month. Is this the best use of my resources?"

"Where is my email budget going?"

This could be made as a third party system where you direct your email through. An auto-response could be sent to emails on the "pay list" with instructions on how to complete the delivery of the message.

The idea is at least easy enough to setup and give it a try...

Some friends and I actually pitched this idea to YC and got an interview a few years ago. We didn't get in.

Part of the issue is as soon as you describe this idea one of the thoughts people will have 'so you want to pay me for receiving spam.'

Twitter is an example of an 'alternative inbox' but the hard nut to crack is to get enough people using a system like it in lieu of email. If that is not achieved, all you end up with is two inboxes with a bunch of junk in them, or at a minimum the same amount of email you always got.

If this is just for famous people...

The problem is, there's no relation between value of the message to famous person, and price someone else is willing to pay to send it.

Just because someone's willing to pay $100 for someone important to read their message, doesn't mean their message is any more valuable to that person than someone not willing to pay money, or willing to pay only $5. Someone important isn't going to care about the money.

Or use hashcash instead of real money http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

The problem is, there already is a simple to raise the transaction cost of initial communication. You write on your web site "please snail mail my agent/representative at xxx." If I really want to talk to the person I'll do that. What types of communication beneficial to the recipient would this leave out?

The only solution is filtering. If your email client could read, organize, and prioritize your email according to rules you've set and behavior it's observed, the problem is solved.

Email is just a transport mechanism for messages. The content and presentation thereof is where the problem lies, not the exchange.

Pretty girls in online dating websites face a similar problem : their inbox is basically full of generic "hello" messages from guys hoping to reach them. I wonder if this solution - the more popular the girl is, the more you have to pay to contact her - would work on the dating scene ?

A friend of mine built this:

https://vipbox.heroku.com/r38y

It would be interesting if you only had to pay if you didn't get a response.

This is fundamentally what LinkedIn has done with InMail right? If you pay LinkedIn then you can send an InMail to someone famous/important etc. without being connected to them.

" billion dollar frighteningly ambitious idea " ... solved with an assistant? Graham likes it because he groks email related services.