As someone who runs a newsletter and is active in the email space (and sees the other side of what happens when a message is sent to thousands of people), I think my concern with this approach is that it comes off as passive-aggressive against everyone, good-faith or not, especially in cases where someone signed up for an email in a double opt-out format where they had to verify that they wanted the messages in the first place. And during this period, if I remember right, a lot of people were tweeting their email accounts in an effort to encourage Earn.com as a revenue stream. To my eyes, it felt like it didn’t solve a problem, but instead brought gatekeeping to email and was not being used for its intended purpose.

I think the problem I have with what I wrote three years ago is that my emotion around this was way over the top, and as a result my legitimate concerns around the model (and how it could damage honest use cases for sending messages, such as newsletters sent in a one-to-many format, or journalists emailing potential sources), got overshadowed by hyperbole. I could imagine hundreds of people doing this on a single list, overwhelming a single user or organization. I would prefer to see an approach like this managed at the standards level rather than from a startup, because I could too easily see it misused.

I have a lot of complex thoughts around this model, because it’s gatekeepy and unworkable at scale, but this clearly whipped-off post didn’t properly convey them.