8 ms·

Earn.com will ruin email if it succeeds (2018)

46 points by ColinWright 5y ago

bellyfullofbac 5y ago
Didn't Bill Gates think of this in his 90's book The Road Ahead? Pay to gain attention, but the receiver can refuse to charge you if s/he found your mail worthy of their attention. (E.g. if you're trying to gain the attention of a lost relative and put a $200 reward so they'd notice your email). Of course there's no cryptocurrency hungry rent-seeker in his concept.
- DennisP 5y ago
  Cryptocurrency could be a convenient way to do the micropayments, without any rent-seeking if the project doesn't mint its own token. They'd need to solve scaling first though.
Kiro 5y ago
This certainly needs a (2018) since Earn was bought by Coinbase and doesn't even have this feature anymore. Edit: (2018) has now been added.
- bryanrasmussen 5y ago
  so evidently they failed and email was saved?
pharmakom 5y ago
Isn’t Earn just a zombie start-up with some over invested VCs at this point? What traction can they demonstrate after years of work and millions in funding?
- Kiro 5y ago
  Earn doesn't exist anymore. They were bought by Coinbase and is now Coinbase Earn which has nothing to do with emails. This article is from 2018.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
andrewzah 5y ago
Nothing is going to kill email.
- beebmam 5y ago
  The sooner people realize this, the better off we'll all be. When companies use slack or other chat-like tools, instead of email, total organizational disaster inevitably ensues.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    Email and instant messaging aren't in competition they fulfill different communication roles and while each can be used as the other (there isn't a deep fundamental difference) each is habitually used in a very different manner. Asynchronous notifications about large tasks shouldn't be done in a medium where that notification is possibly going to scroll off of a screen in a few hours[1] (maybe I'm busy and want to review that long document sometime next week) - while low friction direct communication becomes sloggy through emails - nobody I've ever met would ever email AFK before going off to lunch. And, specifically, I wouldn't want them to mass-email the whole company with ever status change - being able to see availability at a glance makes communication smoother. Companies should use both. 1. Message reminders in most clients can sorta do this but I still prefer emails.
pontus 5y ago
Seems like the incentive is opposite of what I would want. It says that you only pay if you get a response. Doesn't that mean that you should just spam as many people as possible since it's free unless you get a lead?
- ipsum2 5y ago
  How is that different from what we have now?
- DennisP 5y ago
  In fact, the opposite seems like a better plan. You only pay if you waste my time, and if I respond then I'm saying you didn't.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
somenewaccount1 5y ago
And when he says 'ruin email', he means 'ruin how he makes money using email. For the rest of us that are tired of having our time wasted, it could be quite nice.
- dddnzzz334 5y ago
  > he means 'ruin how he makes money using email No, it would ruin email in general. You are always in control of whether you want to read an email or not.
  - erulabs 5y ago
    > You are always in control of whether you want to read an email or not. Demonstrably false. You cannot ignore a category of information without first without interacting with it - as you must first establish that it _is part of that category_. It's impossible to know a spam message that got thru automated filters is spam or not until I read at least the subject line.
  - somenewaccount1 5y ago
    Nope. The open protocol email was built on would still work, just some people would now use a service that blocks newsletters and other annoying spam. Only his business model would be effected, the rest of could merilly go on without consequence of Earn.com's success.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      This ignores an important use case. Hard to imagine, but there might be people you do not know yet wanting to contact you in a way beneficial to you. Maybe for a serious job offer. Somebody secretly in love with you. Somebody admiring your content, and wanting to publish it in a book. I'm sure there's more examples. Such people would need to pay to contact you, and possibly/likely won't.
      - frankish 5y ago
        > Maybe for a serious job offer. If I'm not looking, then I don't want to be contacted for job offers. Regardless, there are more appropriate channels like LinkedIn where I explicitly go regarding jobs. > Somebody secretly in love with you. Would you actually take such a person seriously? This is probably exactly who I want blocked as a phisher. > Somebody admiring your content, and wanting to publish it in a book. Good. Let them prove they want to invest in me by paying to contact me. That way I can trust a little more that they're not trying to con me. I think it is also worth pointing out a couple solutions to these problems that Earn.com had: > If you're a friend of mine, click below to request a spon on my whitelist. Your emails will get through as normal. > If I don't know you, go ahead and send me a paid message. You'll only pay if you get a response.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> Email is open, and incredibly valuable because it is open. A model like this threatens to close it Phones were also open. Now no one answers calls from strangers because of the proliferation of spam calls. This is a natural solution to spam and nothing to be enraged about. It is ridiculous but not for you to dictate how other people manage how you contact them.
- dddnzzz334 5y ago
  That comparison doesn't make any sense. Earn.com was making people go through them in order to contact whoever used its service. It completely killed the open nature of email where if you had someone's email you could be sure the message directly reaches him. It was then his choice if he chose to read your mail or not.
  - thrill 5y ago
    Earn wasn't making anyone use their service.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    I'm not sure exactly how earn.com worked, but when I implemented this for my own email, all such emails would go to a "quarantine" folder until the sender responded to the autogenerated email. So yes, the sender's email did get to me. Thankfully, I would be blissfully unaware of it until the sender confirms they're human. The sender needs to do it only once. There's a great chance that if the sender is not willing to go through that hoop, that they are not someone whose email I want to read. This isn't "killing" the open nature of email. As designed, the email was delivered to me. I just added a workflow to it.
    - igetspam 5y ago
      How did you go about doing this? I would live to require verification for email. I assume you had to have a way to manually dip into the quarantine and white list senders or you'd miss Known Good robots (like banks with bad MFA implementations).
vvilliamperez 5y ago
Sounds like the user intentionally set up Earn instead of unsubscribing to hundreds of newsletters. Seems like it's working just fine.
- rchaud 5y ago
  Thats not worth having an unaccountable 3rd party service intercept all your email.
  - thatguy0900 5y ago
    Not to you, maybe. Good thing you're free to keep your own email. Clearly getting your emails scanned isn't a issue most people care about or Gmail wouldn't be the defacto standard.
    - rchaud 5y ago
      People didn't mind Unroll.me either, until they discovered jt was reading purchase data in emails and selling it via their parent company. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email-privacy-ftc-settlement https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email...
      - skinnymuch 5y ago
        I’m still fine with that. Or more so as the OP said. Sfuff is already being scanned, sold, etc. The trade off was fine when I was using Unroll before.
jszymborski 5y ago
A little off-topic, but this makes me wonder... what if sending email required a very small amount of currency (crypto or fiat) to be sent to escrow. If the receiver decides the email was unsolicited or unwelcome, you would lose that currency (burn it or redistribute it amongst everyone participating). The value can even be small enough to be inconsequential to individuals but costly for high-volume spam.
- zeptonix 5y ago
  Sounds like an idea for a new coin, TBH
- duskwuff 5y ago
  This has been proposed many, many times. It's infeasible for a multitude of reasons. One of those is that it would allow any web service which sends an email to a user-specified address -- even a single email used to verify an account, which is standard practice -- to be abused to bankrupt the service operator.
  - jszymborski 5y ago
    Nothing new under the sun, I guess :P That's interesting, though. The attack would require the collusion of many parties. That's very feasible if you consider how easy it is to create email addresses today. One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. That wouldn't be a solution on it's own, but pair that with delays in applying penalties and an arbitrage system and I think we're looking at an increasingly stable system but with ballooning complexity. Don't know if it's practical, and as you've mentioned I'm sure many people have gone down that road, but I'll be daydreaming about it for the next little bit :)
    - duskwuff 5y ago
      > The attack would require the collusion of many parties. Not sure what parties you have in mind here. As far as I'm aware, it would only require the involvement of a single party entering a bunch of fake or scraped email addresses into a registration form. The malicious party wouldn't receive any benefit, but the web site operator would have their funds drained. > One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. Requiring every online service which sends emails to charge users to register would be disastrous. It would make entire classes of web sites (like hobbyist forums, or even free trials of paid services) infeasible to operate.
BeetleB 5y ago
If he bumps people off his mailing list whenever he's getting this email, isn't it working as intended? The recipient didn't whitelist you, which means he/she doesn't really want your email. I implemented this for my personal email some years ago, although I did put a third "grey" list for people I didn't want such emails to go to (but were still not on whitelist) - mostly because I didn't want to annoy the sender (a non-profit, etc). A lot of my non-tech friends have asked if I can start up a service to offer this to anyone and they claimed they were willing to pay. I never bothered, as such services already exist. The point, though, is that a lot of people do want this.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Yeah... I'm not sure I see an alternative to this being what most people do, unless spam filters somehow win an arms race when it's an uphill battle. But, assuming this replaced AI spam filters rather than being used together, is it any worse than your friend's (or your mailing list member's) email getting classified as spam? At least this way you know they didn't receive it and if you really did care about them specifically you have recourse. If it was just silently classified as spam you don't even know they didn't get it until weeks or months later if they ever notice it in the first place.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    > At least this way you know they didn't receive it and if you really did care about them specifically you have recourse. That was the point I mentioned in another comment: They are notified and if they can't bother doing something tiny for me to get the email, chances are they're not vested in contacting me.
asldihgiyug 5y ago
The author has nothing of substance to contribute. This could have been a tweet but they wrote an article repeating the same thing over and over to get a click on their site. These are exactly the kind of misleading advertising that I want to get rid of and a paid email service (never heard of it before this) seems to do that based on the author's reaction.
brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
This causes yet another rich v poor divide. Poor people may not even be able to pay a few pennies to send an email (perhaps at a downturn when they need to reach out). Hopefully they have a phone, but at least the library might have free computer use for your currently free email.
- brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
  Why the downvotes? Just curious.
mediocregopher 5y ago
This article is completely hyperbolic, and seems to intentionally misunderstand what the goal of a service like Earn is (was?), based solely on a single one of their users having forgotten to add a newsletter to their allowlist. For me, email _needs_ to be an allowlist by default. At this point, pretty much _all_ communication channels, be it calls, sms, or physical mail, need to be allowlist by default. There are too many people out there willing to do shitty scattershot marketing or exploit phishing for me to want to open my inbox to the world. Earn, it seems, did it, and I wish they'd kept doing it long enough for me to hear about it. The fact that they then extended the allowlist into an "allowlist-or-pay-for-my-attention" is a neat feature that I probably would have enabled without much expectation of any real results. The real feature for me is the allowlist-by-default. So yeah, this author is a dingus, Earn may well have _saved_ email if they'd succeeded, and I hope someone else tries.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  agreed. The problem is where to store the whitelists without making email centralized.
  - fxtentacle 5y ago
    We could probably invent an IMAP extension for that. Once Dovecot supports it, plenty of open source webmail solutions can then also support it.
    - mediocregopher 5y ago
      I've thought about doing this very thing! But given all the other interesting projects I have/want to work in domains I'm actually familiar with, this is one that I'll leave to an expert.
yupper32 5y ago
Being subscribed to a newsletter for a year does not correlate with me actually wanting to receive that newsletter anymore. Every once in a while I go through my emails an unsubscribe from all the junk. Junk I've been receiving for months (or more, if I've been lazy) without actually wanting to read or receive them. With that perspective, this sounds like someone who doesn't realize that not everyone wants to continue receiving their newsletter, even if they've technically been subscribed for a year. Instead of unsubscribing from dozens of services every 6 months, including this newsletter, they set up an allowlist.
- fleddr 5y ago
  So you subscribe to a newsletter, apparently by the dozens every 6 months, then take zero action to show disinterest for a long time, and during this time expect the sender to read your mind about whether you still want it? Seems like a fabricated problem. How about not signing up for junk in the first place, or taking the 5 seconds to unsubscribe as it comes in?
  - yupper32 5y ago
    I don't sign up, usually. My email gets onto lists without my explicit permission when I sign up for services/buy products and then I start getting emails. It takes a lot of effort to maintain an email these days. Unsubscribing often doesn't work or is temporary. I can go on and on. Legitimate newsletters that I may sign up for get lost in all of that, and stay around long after I care to read them anymore.
  - BeetleB 5y ago
    Because: 1. Often takes more than 5 seconds. 2. I often continue to receive newsletters after unsubscribing (not just for a few months, but forever - the unsubscribe feature doesn't work). 3. Why spend 5 seconds for each newsletter when I can use a solution that doesn't require any of my time? 4. This method has the benefit of killing spam pretty much instantly - not just newsletters. Why would I want to hunt for an unsubscribe link when I can kill two categories of problems with less effort than killing a few individual emails?
drivingmenuts 5y ago
If an email bounces back to you, just remove the address! I don’t see a problem here, except maybe you’re adding addresses that either didnt sign up or forgot that they signed up.
kyeb 5y ago
The interesting part about this idea to me is the scalability. If you're someone looking to cold-email someone you admire, you're willing to spend a dollar to do that. If you're a spammer who plays number games with your emails (maybe 0.01% result in a successful clickthrough), $1 per email is not even close to worth it. I haven't thought through all the consequences yet, but this seems like a super interesting idea to me, with the potential to kill off the low-probability-of-success emails that I get hundreds of per day!
shortformblog 5y ago
As the person who wrote this rant I wish I had toned it back a bit. This is usually not my style. That is all.
- wilburTheDog 5y ago
  So do you no longer have the same take on it? How would you feel today about an email whitelist with a pay-to-bypass option?
  - shortformblog 5y ago
    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.
    - wink 5y ago
      fwiw, I don't find it overly harsh, but maybe because I'm mostly agreeing with you and am kinda puzzled why people would lump in a newsletter you signed up for with some marketing bullshit you were enrolled unwillingly. Maybe the comparison to snail mail isn't the best but in no way I would accept not getting important government documents just to block some spam pizza place flyers, especially when it's so much easier to compartmentalize your email to actually whitelist or sort stuff automatically...
BayAreaEscapee 5y ago
Certainly, one of the problems with email is that it is free for the sender. If sending an email required even a small amount of "postage", even a thousandth of a cent, it would solve a lot of problems. (Perhaps, the receiver would get the bulk of this "postage", with the service provider creating the infrastructure getting a commission.) The problem with it is that there is no easy way for anyone who is willing to pay a thousandth of a cent to send an email to someone to pay it. Despite how much the internet has boomed in the last thirty years, there is still no good way for individual consumers to send and receive micropayments worldwide.
- rickydroll 5y ago
  back in the mid to thousands. I had a working example of a sender pays email environment. it used hash cash embedded in an email message in combination with content filtering. it was more of a proof of concept that an actual practical system but if I was going to do it again today I would instead put the postage at the SMTP level as a protocol extension where your reputation from the mail service perspective would tell you how big a Hash cash stamp to create. This model would accommodate inflation and familiarity for generating bigger and smaller stamps. It's an interesting project for anyone that has the time.
- admax88qqq 5y ago
  Postage has done nothing to stop the tremendous amount of spam flyers I receive every week.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    That's because postal revenue from spammers helps defray the cost of sending all the regular mail.
    - admax88qqq 5y ago
      It's also because postage doesn't outweigh the revenue from sending spam. So why would that be the case for digital mail?
teddyh 5y ago
I see it’s time to link this thing again, which made the rounds in the late 1990s as spam was starting to become a problem. Everybody and their dog had their own “ultimate solution” to the spam problem, which they all thought was obviously the correct one, but all of them were more or less equally unworkable: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
jlawer 5y ago
I remember plans for email credits / micro transactions back in the 90s as a “cure” for spam. If anything it would be easier to implement today with the centralisation of email services around large providers (MS, Google, etc).
lnanek2 5y ago
Seems an odd thing to be infuriated about. Like, some people have no email address, right? Should we be infuriated about that? No? Then why are we infuriated about people with an email address with a whitelist? It doesn't stop you from having an open email address if you want. It's their choice. Personally, it sounds pretty handy. Every day my personal email address gets 100 messages. The only reason I check it is once every week or two my family might have sent something. Whitelist sounds perfect. As it is I just open Gmail, search for my family's address, and close it if nothing shows up. The Gmail icon on my phone has 9,714 unread messages...never gonna go through all that.
deeblering4 5y ago
Spoiler — it won’t.
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I'm pretty sure Earn.com was working exactly as intended, right down to the induction of impotent rage in the newsletter sender. There should be more services like this.
billpg 5y ago
"Email is open" In practice, no. Your server would need to be on many pre-approved lists if you want to avoid all of your messages being saved to most user's spam folders. Only the big operators with full-time staff monitoring the system get on the list.
- nicolaslem 5y ago
  This is true only for a few actors that represent a fraction of email traffic. However they break the system for everyone since even a 5% chance of having your email going to /dev/null is way too disruptive for most people.
flowerfarm 5y ago
This is a great idea and I may sign up! Email being open WAS awesome until marketers started abusing the privilege and wasting our finite valuable time. Well if you want my attention, pay me for it. And if that's not reasonable then you don't respect me as a person only a money mouth and I don't want to be your customer. Every random salesman is not entitled to my time just because I have an email address. This service is genius. And how about those services selling our email addresses? I hope this puts them out of business as well. Actually it's just a scam to push crypto adoption. In a few months that will all be worthless so to hell with it.
peanut_worm 5y ago
I don’t really see an issue

46 points by ColinWright 5y ago

Didn't Bill Gates think of this in his 90's book The Road Ahead? Pay to gain attention, but the receiver can refuse to charge you if s/he found your mail worthy of their attention. (E.g. if you're trying to gain the attention of a lost relative and put a $200 reward so they'd notice your email). Of course there's no cryptocurrency hungry rent-seeker in his concept.

DennisP 5y ago
Cryptocurrency could be a convenient way to do the micropayments, without any rent-seeking if the project doesn't mint its own token. They'd need to solve scaling first though.

Kiro 5y ago

This certainly needs a (2018) since Earn was bought by Coinbase and doesn't even have this feature anymore. Edit: (2018) has now been added.

bryanrasmussen 5y ago
so evidently they failed and email was saved?

pharmakom 5y ago

Isn’t Earn just a zombie start-up with some over invested VCs at this point? What traction can they demonstrate after years of work and millions in funding?

Kiro 5y ago
Earn doesn't exist anymore. They were bought by Coinbase and is now Coinbase Earn which has nothing to do with emails. This article is from 2018.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

andrewzah 5y ago

Nothing is going to kill email.

beebmam 5y ago
The sooner people realize this, the better off we'll all be. When companies use slack or other chat-like tools, instead of email, total organizational disaster inevitably ensues.
- munk-a 5y ago
  Email and instant messaging aren't in competition they fulfill different communication roles and while each can be used as the other (there isn't a deep fundamental difference) each is habitually used in a very different manner. Asynchronous notifications about large tasks shouldn't be done in a medium where that notification is possibly going to scroll off of a screen in a few hours[1] (maybe I'm busy and want to review that long document sometime next week) - while low friction direct communication becomes sloggy through emails - nobody I've ever met would ever email AFK before going off to lunch. And, specifically, I wouldn't want them to mass-email the whole company with ever status change - being able to see availability at a glance makes communication smoother. Companies should use both. 1. Message reminders in most clients can sorta do this but I still prefer emails.

pontus 5y ago

Seems like the incentive is opposite of what I would want. It says that you only pay if you get a response. Doesn't that mean that you should just spam as many people as possible since it's free unless you get a lead?

ipsum2 5y ago
How is that different from what we have now?
DennisP 5y ago
In fact, the opposite seems like a better plan. You only pay if you waste my time, and if I respond then I'm saying you didn't.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

somenewaccount1 5y ago

And when he says 'ruin email', he means 'ruin how he makes money using email. For the rest of us that are tired of having our time wasted, it could be quite nice.

dddnzzz334 5y ago
> he means 'ruin how he makes money using email No, it would ruin email in general. You are always in control of whether you want to read an email or not.
- erulabs 5y ago
  > You are always in control of whether you want to read an email or not. Demonstrably false. You cannot ignore a category of information without first without interacting with it - as you must first establish that it _is part of that category_. It's impossible to know a spam message that got thru automated filters is spam or not until I read at least the subject line.
- somenewaccount1 5y ago
  Nope. The open protocol email was built on would still work, just some people would now use a service that blocks newsletters and other annoying spam. Only his business model would be effected, the rest of could merilly go on without consequence of Earn.com's success.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    This ignores an important use case. Hard to imagine, but there might be people you do not know yet wanting to contact you in a way beneficial to you. Maybe for a serious job offer. Somebody secretly in love with you. Somebody admiring your content, and wanting to publish it in a book. I'm sure there's more examples. Such people would need to pay to contact you, and possibly/likely won't.
    - frankish 5y ago
      > Maybe for a serious job offer. If I'm not looking, then I don't want to be contacted for job offers. Regardless, there are more appropriate channels like LinkedIn where I explicitly go regarding jobs. > Somebody secretly in love with you. Would you actually take such a person seriously? This is probably exactly who I want blocked as a phisher. > Somebody admiring your content, and wanting to publish it in a book. Good. Let them prove they want to invest in me by paying to contact me. That way I can trust a little more that they're not trying to con me. I think it is also worth pointing out a couple solutions to these problems that Earn.com had: > If you're a friend of mine, click below to request a spon on my whitelist. Your emails will get through as normal. > If I don't know you, go ahead and send me a paid message. You'll only pay if you get a response.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

> Email is open, and incredibly valuable because it is open. A model like this threatens to close it Phones were also open. Now no one answers calls from strangers because of the proliferation of spam calls. This is a natural solution to spam and nothing to be enraged about. It is ridiculous but not for you to dictate how other people manage how you contact them.

dddnzzz334 5y ago
That comparison doesn't make any sense. Earn.com was making people go through them in order to contact whoever used its service. It completely killed the open nature of email where if you had someone's email you could be sure the message directly reaches him. It was then his choice if he chose to read your mail or not.
- thrill 5y ago
  Earn wasn't making anyone use their service.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  I'm not sure exactly how earn.com worked, but when I implemented this for my own email, all such emails would go to a "quarantine" folder until the sender responded to the autogenerated email. So yes, the sender's email did get to me. Thankfully, I would be blissfully unaware of it until the sender confirms they're human. The sender needs to do it only once. There's a great chance that if the sender is not willing to go through that hoop, that they are not someone whose email I want to read. This isn't "killing" the open nature of email. As designed, the email was delivered to me. I just added a workflow to it.
  - igetspam 5y ago
    How did you go about doing this? I would live to require verification for email. I assume you had to have a way to manually dip into the quarantine and white list senders or you'd miss Known Good robots (like banks with bad MFA implementations).

vvilliamperez 5y ago

Sounds like the user intentionally set up Earn instead of unsubscribing to hundreds of newsletters. Seems like it's working just fine.

rchaud 5y ago
Thats not worth having an unaccountable 3rd party service intercept all your email.
- thatguy0900 5y ago
  Not to you, maybe. Good thing you're free to keep your own email. Clearly getting your emails scanned isn't a issue most people care about or Gmail wouldn't be the defacto standard.
  - rchaud 5y ago
    People didn't mind Unroll.me either, until they discovered jt was reading purchase data in emails and selling it via their parent company. https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email-privacy-ftc-settlement https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/21027159/unroll-me-email...
    - skinnymuch 5y ago
      I’m still fine with that. Or more so as the OP said. Sfuff is already being scanned, sold, etc. The trade off was fine when I was using Unroll before.

jszymborski 5y ago

A little off-topic, but this makes me wonder... what if sending email required a very small amount of currency (crypto or fiat) to be sent to escrow. If the receiver decides the email was unsolicited or unwelcome, you would lose that currency (burn it or redistribute it amongst everyone participating). The value can even be small enough to be inconsequential to individuals but costly for high-volume spam.

zeptonix 5y ago
Sounds like an idea for a new coin, TBH
duskwuff 5y ago
This has been proposed many, many times. It's infeasible for a multitude of reasons. One of those is that it would allow any web service which sends an email to a user-specified address -- even a single email used to verify an account, which is standard practice -- to be abused to bankrupt the service operator.
- jszymborski 5y ago
  Nothing new under the sun, I guess :P That's interesting, though. The attack would require the collusion of many parties. That's very feasible if you consider how easy it is to create email addresses today. One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. That wouldn't be a solution on it's own, but pair that with delays in applying penalties and an arbitrage system and I think we're looking at an increasingly stable system but with ballooning complexity. Don't know if it's practical, and as you've mentioned I'm sure many people have gone down that road, but I'll be daydreaming about it for the next little bit :)
  - duskwuff 5y ago
    > The attack would require the collusion of many parties. Not sure what parties you have in mind here. As far as I'm aware, it would only require the involvement of a single party entering a bunch of fake or scraped email addresses into a registration form. The malicious party wouldn't receive any benefit, but the web site operator would have their funds drained. > One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. Requiring every online service which sends emails to charge users to register would be disastrous. It would make entire classes of web sites (like hobbyist forums, or even free trials of paid services) infeasible to operate.

BeetleB 5y ago

If he bumps people off his mailing list whenever he's getting this email, isn't it working as intended? The recipient didn't whitelist you, which means he/she doesn't really want your email. I implemented this for my personal email some years ago, although I did put a third "grey" list for people I didn't want such emails to go to (but were still not on whitelist) - mostly because I didn't want to annoy the sender (a non-profit, etc). A lot of my non-tech friends have asked if I can start up a service to offer this to anyone and they claimed they were willing to pay. I never bothered, as such services already exist. The point, though, is that a lot of people do want this.

neltnerb 5y ago
Yeah... I'm not sure I see an alternative to this being what most people do, unless spam filters somehow win an arms race when it's an uphill battle. But, assuming this replaced AI spam filters rather than being used together, is it any worse than your friend's (or your mailing list member's) email getting classified as spam? At least this way you know they didn't receive it and if you really did care about them specifically you have recourse. If it was just silently classified as spam you don't even know they didn't get it until weeks or months later if they ever notice it in the first place.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  > At least this way you know they didn't receive it and if you really did care about them specifically you have recourse. That was the point I mentioned in another comment: They are notified and if they can't bother doing something tiny for me to get the email, chances are they're not vested in contacting me.

asldihgiyug 5y ago

The author has nothing of substance to contribute. This could have been a tweet but they wrote an article repeating the same thing over and over to get a click on their site. These are exactly the kind of misleading advertising that I want to get rid of and a paid email service (never heard of it before this) seems to do that based on the author's reaction.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago

This causes yet another rich v poor divide. Poor people may not even be able to pay a few pennies to send an email (perhaps at a downturn when they need to reach out). Hopefully they have a phone, but at least the library might have free computer use for your currently free email.

brutal_chaos_ 5y ago
Why the downvotes? Just curious.

mediocregopher 5y ago

This article is completely hyperbolic, and seems to intentionally misunderstand what the goal of a service like Earn is (was?), based solely on a single one of their users having forgotten to add a newsletter to their allowlist. For me, email _needs_ to be an allowlist by default. At this point, pretty much _all_ communication channels, be it calls, sms, or physical mail, need to be allowlist by default. There are too many people out there willing to do shitty scattershot marketing or exploit phishing for me to want to open my inbox to the world. Earn, it seems, did it, and I wish they'd kept doing it long enough for me to hear about it. The fact that they then extended the allowlist into an "allowlist-or-pay-for-my-attention" is a neat feature that I probably would have enabled without much expectation of any real results. The real feature for me is the allowlist-by-default. So yeah, this author is a dingus, Earn may well have _saved_ email if they'd succeeded, and I hope someone else tries.

cblconfederate 5y ago
agreed. The problem is where to store the whitelists without making email centralized.
- fxtentacle 5y ago
  We could probably invent an IMAP extension for that. Once Dovecot supports it, plenty of open source webmail solutions can then also support it.
  - mediocregopher 5y ago
    I've thought about doing this very thing! But given all the other interesting projects I have/want to work in domains I'm actually familiar with, this is one that I'll leave to an expert.

yupper32 5y ago

Being subscribed to a newsletter for a year does not correlate with me actually wanting to receive that newsletter anymore. Every once in a while I go through my emails an unsubscribe from all the junk. Junk I've been receiving for months (or more, if I've been lazy) without actually wanting to read or receive them. With that perspective, this sounds like someone who doesn't realize that not everyone wants to continue receiving their newsletter, even if they've technically been subscribed for a year. Instead of unsubscribing from dozens of services every 6 months, including this newsletter, they set up an allowlist.

fleddr 5y ago
So you subscribe to a newsletter, apparently by the dozens every 6 months, then take zero action to show disinterest for a long time, and during this time expect the sender to read your mind about whether you still want it? Seems like a fabricated problem. How about not signing up for junk in the first place, or taking the 5 seconds to unsubscribe as it comes in?
- yupper32 5y ago
  I don't sign up, usually. My email gets onto lists without my explicit permission when I sign up for services/buy products and then I start getting emails. It takes a lot of effort to maintain an email these days. Unsubscribing often doesn't work or is temporary. I can go on and on. Legitimate newsletters that I may sign up for get lost in all of that, and stay around long after I care to read them anymore.
- BeetleB 5y ago
  Because: 1. Often takes more than 5 seconds. 2. I often continue to receive newsletters after unsubscribing (not just for a few months, but forever - the unsubscribe feature doesn't work). 3. Why spend 5 seconds for each newsletter when I can use a solution that doesn't require any of my time? 4. This method has the benefit of killing spam pretty much instantly - not just newsletters. Why would I want to hunt for an unsubscribe link when I can kill two categories of problems with less effort than killing a few individual emails?

drivingmenuts 5y ago

If an email bounces back to you, just remove the address! I don’t see a problem here, except maybe you’re adding addresses that either didnt sign up or forgot that they signed up.

kyeb 5y ago

The interesting part about this idea to me is the scalability. If you're someone looking to cold-email someone you admire, you're willing to spend a dollar to do that. If you're a spammer who plays number games with your emails (maybe 0.01% result in a successful clickthrough), $1 per email is not even close to worth it. I haven't thought through all the consequences yet, but this seems like a super interesting idea to me, with the potential to kill off the low-probability-of-success emails that I get hundreds of per day!

shortformblog 5y ago

As the person who wrote this rant I wish I had toned it back a bit. This is usually not my style. That is all.

wilburTheDog 5y ago
So do you no longer have the same take on it? How would you feel today about an email whitelist with a pay-to-bypass option?
- shortformblog 5y ago
  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.
  - wink 5y ago
    fwiw, I don't find it overly harsh, but maybe because I'm mostly agreeing with you and am kinda puzzled why people would lump in a newsletter you signed up for with some marketing bullshit you were enrolled unwillingly. Maybe the comparison to snail mail isn't the best but in no way I would accept not getting important government documents just to block some spam pizza place flyers, especially when it's so much easier to compartmentalize your email to actually whitelist or sort stuff automatically...

BayAreaEscapee 5y ago

Certainly, one of the problems with email is that it is free for the sender. If sending an email required even a small amount of "postage", even a thousandth of a cent, it would solve a lot of problems. (Perhaps, the receiver would get the bulk of this "postage", with the service provider creating the infrastructure getting a commission.) The problem with it is that there is no easy way for anyone who is willing to pay a thousandth of a cent to send an email to someone to pay it. Despite how much the internet has boomed in the last thirty years, there is still no good way for individual consumers to send and receive micropayments worldwide.

rickydroll 5y ago
back in the mid to thousands. I had a working example of a sender pays email environment. it used hash cash embedded in an email message in combination with content filtering. it was more of a proof of concept that an actual practical system but if I was going to do it again today I would instead put the postage at the SMTP level as a protocol extension where your reputation from the mail service perspective would tell you how big a Hash cash stamp to create. This model would accommodate inflation and familiarity for generating bigger and smaller stamps. It's an interesting project for anyone that has the time.
admax88qqq 5y ago
Postage has done nothing to stop the tremendous amount of spam flyers I receive every week.
- rchaud 5y ago
  That's because postal revenue from spammers helps defray the cost of sending all the regular mail.
  - admax88qqq 5y ago
    It's also because postage doesn't outweigh the revenue from sending spam. So why would that be the case for digital mail?

teddyh 5y ago

I see it’s time to link this thing again, which made the rounds in the late 1990s as spam was starting to become a problem. Everybody and their dog had their own “ultimate solution” to the spam problem, which they all thought was obviously the correct one, but all of them were more or less equally unworkable: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

jlawer 5y ago

I remember plans for email credits / micro transactions back in the 90s as a “cure” for spam. If anything it would be easier to implement today with the centralisation of email services around large providers (MS, Google, etc).

lnanek2 5y ago

Seems an odd thing to be infuriated about. Like, some people have no email address, right? Should we be infuriated about that? No? Then why are we infuriated about people with an email address with a whitelist? It doesn't stop you from having an open email address if you want. It's their choice. Personally, it sounds pretty handy. Every day my personal email address gets 100 messages. The only reason I check it is once every week or two my family might have sent something. Whitelist sounds perfect. As it is I just open Gmail, search for my family's address, and close it if nothing shows up. The Gmail icon on my phone has 9,714 unread messages...never gonna go through all that.

deeblering4 5y ago

Spoiler — it won’t.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

I'm pretty sure Earn.com was working exactly as intended, right down to the induction of impotent rage in the newsletter sender. There should be more services like this.

billpg 5y ago

"Email is open" In practice, no. Your server would need to be on many pre-approved lists if you want to avoid all of your messages being saved to most user's spam folders. Only the big operators with full-time staff monitoring the system get on the list.

nicolaslem 5y ago
This is true only for a few actors that represent a fraction of email traffic. However they break the system for everyone since even a 5% chance of having your email going to /dev/null is way too disruptive for most people.

flowerfarm 5y ago

This is a great idea and I may sign up! Email being open WAS awesome until marketers started abusing the privilege and wasting our finite valuable time. Well if you want my attention, pay me for it. And if that's not reasonable then you don't respect me as a person only a money mouth and I don't want to be your customer. Every random salesman is not entitled to my time just because I have an email address. This service is genius. And how about those services selling our email addresses? I hope this puts them out of business as well. Actually it's just a scam to push crypto adoption. In a few months that will all be worthless so to hell with it.

peanut_worm 5y ago

I don’t really see an issue