Ask HN: Would you pay for email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Would you pay for email?

5 pointsmcxx6 comments

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.

What do you think? Do you also see it as evil or would you appreciate this service?

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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