
Ask HN: Idea feedback – Service where people pay to reach your inbox - dsinecos
Problem - The bar to sending an email is too low resulting in casual low-effort messages. These messages take up time and attention and are difficult to filter. For instance, recruiter spam.<p>Solution - A service where a person pays a nominal amount, say $2, to land in your inbox. These messages will have &#x27;PRIORITY INBOX&#x27; in their subject. This lets you filter the high-effort messages at a glance.<p>Possible use cases<p>1. Recruiter spam - This will let you filter the serious from the casual requests at a glance. Messages with &#x27;PRIORITY INBOX&#x27; in the subject tell you the recruiter paid to get your attention and likely worth your time.<p>2. For an influencer - Say you run a blog and review developer tools every week. If you get tons of requests to cover different tools, you could use this service to filter out low-effort requests<p>3. Mentor-mentee - As mentor you can filter high-effort queries via this service. As the sender pays to reach your inbox, the messages are likely to be more focused so that you respond<p>This model can apply to other types of unsolicited messages where<p>a) Sender wants to stand-out from the generic low effort messages<p>b) Receiver wants to quickly filter high-effort and casual messages<p>I&#x27;d like to get HN&#x27;s thoughts on<p>1. If you see value in such a service<p>2. For what type of messages, filtering quality and low-effort messages is of most value to you? (like developer-recruiter, mentor-mentee)<p>3. What concerns about this service would keep you from using it? (Assuming privacy and mail deliverability are handled to your satisfaction)<p>I&#x27;ve started work on this product. If you want to join private beta, signup here - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;airtable.com&#x2F;shr6ifqw3468JFT0H
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verdverm
On the receiving side, I would not like this, I don't want a random person
influencing my priority inbox. Would likely create filters to send them to
spam.

Someone paying to prioritize their email would indicate low quality sender to
me.

On the sender side, why can't I just add the same PRIORITY INBOX subject text
on my own.

The real issue is that senders don't take the time to understand and write a
personalized email. I don't think charging them will improve the quality or
situation.

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dsinecos
Do you think using templates for certain kinds of emails would improve the
quality of communication?

Like how there are issue templates on Github, say you defined a template which
recruiters could use to approach you.

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\- Will the sender have to pay for each mail or it is a one time thing? \-
Will the receiver have the option to adjust the nominal amount and who keeps
the amount paid by the sender?

