

Ask HN: Would you pay for email? - mcxx

The recent startup idea from Matt Cutts reminded me of one of my own. Imagine an email service that acts as a proxy between email senders and your inbox. The senders however have to pay an arbitrary amount of money to get an answer (I won't go into other details, I think you get the point). This seems logical as your time is precious and (in some cases) you should be rewarded for answering emails. This would also filter out spam. On the other hand, my perception of such a service is that it's evil. That's the main reason why I haven't pursued the idea. It certainly would not replace standard, free email, but I can see how people would hate this.<p>What do you think? Do you also see it as evil or would you appreciate this service?
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rmc00
This is an interesting service to consider from the perspective of both the
sender and recipient of an email message.

The value that you create for the recipient is the spam filtering that you
mention only as an aside. If someone is paying to send an email message, it's
very unlikely that the message is spam. This form of micropayment makes email
cost a little bit to senders, but it makes spam lose its cost-effectiveness.
As a recipient, you can pretty much guarantee that email coming from this
service is not spam. That makes going through your inbox a lot simpler.

On the other hand, value is created for the sender of email too. Because the
recipient of the email is (mostly) assured that the message isn't spam, a
response is much more likely. It sounds like you have a means (or idea) to
guarantee a response too, which obviously amplifies this effect.

I think the service has potential. The first question that comes to my mind is
who do you charge? You definitely charge the sender, but do you charge the
recipient as well? Also, how do you make this work in a user's existing inbox?
It seems like having users check another inbox will decrease the effectiveness
of the service.

It's interesting that your solution is sort of an incremental solution to
spam. To me, the best solution to spam would be to add authentication to SMTP
or a new protocol with widespread adoption. However, your solution is more
realistic.

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michael_dorfman
Microsoft Research has an interesting project along these lines, called "Penny
Black".

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_Black_(research_project)>
<http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/PennyBlack/>

It doesn't sound particularly evil to me. What's the danger, in your mind?

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mcxx
Email has been free since the beginning. People are used to it, that's why I
think senders would hate having to use it, even boycott the service. It would
also set a dangerous precendence that email doesn't have to be free.

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michael_dorfman
Sorry, I disagree. Sending email has almost _never_ been free.

Most of us pay for internet access. Email has been a non-itemized portion of
this, but we still have to pay.

Part of the cost that we are paying are the amortized costs of spam, which
costs each ISP a fair amount of resources. These costs are passed along to
consumers, of course.

I can't imagine individual users boycotting ISPs that used a service like
this, as it would result in reduced Internet costs and reduced spam. If you
are not sending unsolicited emails, you'd never have to pay, and even if you
are sending small amounts of unsolicited emails, the new costs would be more
than offset by the savings passed on by the ISP.

The only people who'd be against it would be the spammers-- and once a
critical mass of ISPs implemented, they wouldn't really have much of a choice:
they'd either have to pay to send, or lose access to a large percentage of
mailboxes.

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gaius
This is LinkedIn's business model - search for InMail on their site.

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mcxx
Cool, so a) it works and b) at least some people are already used to it.

