8 ms·

Gated challenges unknown senders to donate to charity in order to reach you

41 points by vezycash 5y ago

somehnacct3757 5y ago
Spammers have to donate a token amount to the postal service before their real-world letter or pamphlet can reach my physical inbox. And I still get that spam. So why would payment stop digital spammers?
- asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
  I still get some snail mail spam, but much less than I used to. Also, I think a dollar per message is far more than spammers usually pay for sending snail spam.
- willcipriano 5y ago
  The USPS offers spam as a service, those senders pay rates lower than you can get as someone sending grandma a birthday card.
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    Gated's website contains a CTA for Sender Accounts which will be the same exact situation for email. Donate $X for the privelege of bypassing the standard rate and continue spamming their users. It's the same toll booth strategy as the ad blockers that tried to shake down the digital ad market. Trust us to protect your inbox, unless of course a Preferred Gold Partner tries to contact you. This time it's laundered thru a donation rhetoric. They aren't even a non-profit themselves, and they have investors to pay back. Anyone who signs up for Gated (it's free!*) will in time find themselves The Product which Gated sells to their real volume customers, spammers. Getting back to my original point, while Gated at scale would increase the price of spam it wouldn't stop spammers. Their business model relies on the existence of spammers so why put them out of business?
    - mmmoody 5y ago
      Thank you for being curious about what we're building! - We keep the power in the hands of users, not senders: Each Gated user sets their donation amount, chooses their nonprofit, and can Gate unwanted senders. In a world of automated email marketing technology driven by B2B selling, we're committed to building the first "buyer-side" tech. - Our nonprofit-focused model is based on early research with users who saw greater value in giving to nonprofits than collecting payments for themselves. We partner with Getchange.io to ensure transparency and accountability in payments to nonprofits.
version_five 5y ago
Interesting... I guess I can see this appealing to a certain demographic. I can't see every using it myself, on the receiving end because I'm not that important, and it I was I hope I'd be cooler about it, and on the sending end because in general would be more likely to look for an introduction or reach out over linkedin. But maybe there is a niche?
traceroute66 5y ago
What a horrible concept. Two reasons: a) Implies someone thinks they are too important to deal with emails that they establish a paywall (the charity bit is irrelevant, frankly). And yet obviously they are not actually important/successful enough because otherwise they would have a PA/Secretary acting as gatekeeper. So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly. b) The whole ramming charity donations down your throat thing. Its MY business alone to choose what charities to donate to and how much I donate. I do not need other people, whether chuggers on the street or "gated challenges" attempting to force (or "strongly persuade" if you prefer) me to donate to their chosen cause. c) The whole thing is too fragile anyway. What about your bank/Amazon etc. ? Are they going to have to make a donation before reaching your email ? Good luck with that ! People who think they are "too busy for email" should just setup a "hidden" email instead that you only give the chosen few and that comes straight through to your Inbox, then a second email that goes to some folder you look at as and when, its not rocket science.
- jokethrowaway 5y ago
  A is why I think this service won't have customers
  - doctor_eval 5y ago
    This is what I think when someone asks me to join a meeting by sending me a Calendly link. Even though arranging an acceptable appointment time can be annoying, it’s a little personal to-and-fro that somehow sets the tone. I dunno, maybe I’m just old.
- teruakohatu 5y ago
  > So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly. I think you are being too harsh. This idea has existed for a long time as a hypothetical way to reduce spam: make the sender pay for postage. The charity aspect is simply a feel-better way to require postage. A cryptocurrency that simply burnt up would also work (but be wasteful to the environment). This would not be used for a primary private personal email account. It would be used for a public email account used by, for example, an open source developer. It would keep signal high and spam low. The real problem I see is that senders, after paying a dollar or two and spending time going through a payment gateway, are going to feel entitled to a response and may get angry when they don't get their money's worth.
imgabe 5y ago
I can’t imagine anyone worth contacting using a service like this.
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
They're taking a 15% fee plus payment processing fees that might be just as high, for a total of 30%: "On average, 15% of each donation covers processing fees (varies by donation size). 15% goes to support Gated as a free service for everyone. The rest (70%) goes to the nonprofit chosen by the Gated user." (For small donations, this can be reasonable, especially if the processing fees are actual third party fees and not padded.) There's also a link that I expect to be heavily abused: "in the Challenge Email, there is a one-click solution for people you know personally to click and have their email delivered immediately." Overall, it's an interesting idea but likely will struggle with the risk of putting off the wrong person (e.g. an important business partner) being too high. https://www.gated.com/blog-posts/sellers-love-gated https://www.gated.com/blog-posts/sellers-love-gated has a screenshot of their challenge e-mail and I think they did find a pretty good wording. Another issue is that this (obviously) requires giving them access to your inbox, which not everyone (and in particular not every company) will be OK with - especially as if they get hacked, the attacker could get those access keys. Can keys be limited so they only have access to metadata? (Even then, metadata + the ability to send e-mail as someone is devastating because it can be used for spear phishing.) In general, I wish e-mail was easily sortable into categories like "response", "entirely human written individual e-mail sent to only me", "human written e-mail sent to a small group of people", "human written e-mail sent to a large group of people", "human e-mail using boilerplate text", "notification about human activity involving something that human wrote somewhere", "notification about anything else", "transactional e-mail", "service announcement", "newsletter", etc.
- jsmith99 5y ago
  The fee goes to support Gated 'as a free [sic] service for everyone'?
  - henriquez 5y ago
    It’s free to visit their homepage. Why split hairs?!
- mmmoody 5y ago
  Thanks @tgsovlerkhgsel - great thinking here. Love how you categorized those categories - something we're looking at on the back-end for sure. More details (in response to your thoughtful points): - The customizable challenge email is indeed something we're constantly refining, to avoid that issue you pointed out about inbound emails of importance. We're working with some early users to refine this - and most people are happy with how it works. - Users log in with their Google accounts, so all email based control is managed in that way (with permissions revokable at any time)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
unglaublich 5y ago
Sometimes I play around with the concept of e-mail stamps. Sending costs you credit. Receiving earns you credits. That way mass-sending of value-less content will be discouraged. There are many problems with this, but at least it would largely stop the spam game.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
  - ricardo81 5y ago
    First thing that came to mind reading this. Was never sure how widely implemented it became.
octoberfranklin 5y ago
I am totally going to use this for receiving DMCA notifications.
plantain 5y ago
These services seem to be increasingly popular, as measured by my support load of tickets from users who are unable to complete the signup flow on my SaaS because they are unable to receive an activation email - or a reply to their ticket...
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  On a related note.. I use Bitdefender business email security. But this also applies to Sophos Email Security, or something else like it. When you receive an email, all links are replaced with links that bounce through the gateway, which downloads the page first and looks for malicious redirects, scans it for malicious fingerprints, etc. Then it shows you the chain of redirects and there's a button to actually proceed to the site. On some sites, they require you to login to activate the account, and this scan eats up the activation token. So when you click through, it errors up like "this token is already used", and you can't activate your account anymore on the real visit. Happens on enough sites to be annoying.
  - scoot 5y ago
    Which also has the effect of making it impossible to spot obviously fraudulent emails from the domain they link to. Not that this is foolproof.
    - Cerium 5y ago
      Yes! And our It department still gives us a mandatory training on how to look at links before clicking.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mkl95 5y ago
> It is not even wrong Wolfgang Pauli
taspeotis 5y ago
> As seen on [ marketing podcasts ] Might as well just elide that entire section it does not inspire confidence.
pxeger1 5y ago
Anyone else find this title unparseable? Even after I realised "Gated" is a proper noun, not an adjective
- Ndymium 5y ago
  > X challenges (verb) Y to Z in order to reach you where X = Gated, Y = unknown senders, and Z = donate to charity.
  - jimmytidey 5y ago
    Only on HN would this count as addressing the point that the title is poorly written.
    - Ndymium 5y ago
      I guess I missed the point, as I provided an example on how to parse it, since it was deemed "unparseable".
  - xondono 5y ago
    I still have no idea what the title is about. The “clickbaitiness” of HN posts is increasing, and I don’t like it.
    - Operyl 5y ago
      They filter your email and send challenges to unknown senders that require they donate to charity in order to get their email in your inbox. I agree with your statement (in regards to other articles), but the title is definitely exactly what it is (just confusing because of the product name).
    - jasode 5y ago
      >I still have no idea what the title is about. The “clickbaitiness” of HN posts The post's title isn't clickbait. It's a wording style that simply has many auxiliary verbs and grammar articles removed.[1] Anyway, the same sentence with extra helper words in [] may help in parsing it: "[The company called] Gated [has a junk email filtering service that issues] challenges [to] unknown senders [by forcing them] to donate to charity in order to reach you"* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style#Headline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style#Headline
onion2k 5y ago
I'm not a marketing expert, but I'd like to suggest using the slogan "Keep poor people away with Gated!"
- jka 5y ago
  And for the next item on the scrolling marquee, I'd suggest "Require approved tribute from mortals before they dare speak within your realm!" (I'm also yet to make much headway in the marketing industry)
- amelius 5y ago
  They can subscribe as a charity.
itissid 5y ago
Are there exceptions like emails from a whitelist of NGOs and Non Profits?
- notimetorelax 5y ago
  They mention that they allow emails from your list OR unknown who donated.
- mmmoody 5y ago
  Gated users have the ability to add any individual emails or entire domains to their Allow List at any time. (Or - conversely - to set status so that they will NOT hear from individuals or domains!) There are also some rules that Gated applies as a default, like not sending Challenge Emails to known bots (noreply@) More details on gated.com/faq! And we love to hear from anyone with other questions --- support@gated.com
amelius 5y ago
So a government institution tries to send me an email, gets this challenge in response. What do you think is going to happen?
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Not that I support this Gated thing, but: 1. You could have a separate email which you provide people/institutions which don't need to be filtered. 2. You could white-list "*.gov" addresses maybe?
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  If the government is cold emailing or calling you, it's a scam. Wait for the letter in the mail. If they're not cold emailing you, they're not an unknown sender.
  - amelius 5y ago
    By this logic, I wouldn't need a challenge to begin with. Every legitimate sender would already be in my contacts list.
    - somehnacct3757 5y ago
      My claim is specific to the U.S. government who will never make first contact via email or phone. If you choose to opt-in to digital correspondence then they aren't an unknown sender, and they send you snail mail about that too. It was in response to GP claiming you would miss important government email by using this service. However, there is no such thing as unsolicited important government email.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mmmoody 5y ago
Hi everyone! As Cofounder and Head of Marketing, I really appreciate reading everyone's thoughts and perspectives on what we're building at Gated. We're working to build a solution that gives people back control over their inboxes and attention. And yes, we're trying to solve the problem for everyone - not just people who can afford to pay for it. It's certainly a nuanced space with lots of different perspectives and our team is always happy to answer questions. (I'd also suggest checking the website for more info than you can get in the TC article.)

41 points by vezycash 5y ago

Spammers have to donate a token amount to the postal service before their real-world letter or pamphlet can reach my physical inbox. And I still get that spam. So why would payment stop digital spammers?

asdfasgasdgasdg 5y ago
I still get some snail mail spam, but much less than I used to. Also, I think a dollar per message is far more than spammers usually pay for sending snail spam.
willcipriano 5y ago
The USPS offers spam as a service, those senders pay rates lower than you can get as someone sending grandma a birthday card.
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  Gated's website contains a CTA for Sender Accounts which will be the same exact situation for email. Donate $X for the privelege of bypassing the standard rate and continue spamming their users. It's the same toll booth strategy as the ad blockers that tried to shake down the digital ad market. Trust us to protect your inbox, unless of course a Preferred Gold Partner tries to contact you. This time it's laundered thru a donation rhetoric. They aren't even a non-profit themselves, and they have investors to pay back. Anyone who signs up for Gated (it's free!*) will in time find themselves The Product which Gated sells to their real volume customers, spammers. Getting back to my original point, while Gated at scale would increase the price of spam it wouldn't stop spammers. Their business model relies on the existence of spammers so why put them out of business?
  - mmmoody 5y ago
    Thank you for being curious about what we're building! - We keep the power in the hands of users, not senders: Each Gated user sets their donation amount, chooses their nonprofit, and can Gate unwanted senders. In a world of automated email marketing technology driven by B2B selling, we're committed to building the first "buyer-side" tech. - Our nonprofit-focused model is based on early research with users who saw greater value in giving to nonprofits than collecting payments for themselves. We partner with Getchange.io to ensure transparency and accountability in payments to nonprofits.

version_five 5y ago

Interesting... I guess I can see this appealing to a certain demographic. I can't see every using it myself, on the receiving end because I'm not that important, and it I was I hope I'd be cooler about it, and on the sending end because in general would be more likely to look for an introduction or reach out over linkedin. But maybe there is a niche?

traceroute66 5y ago

What a horrible concept. Two reasons: a) Implies someone thinks they are too important to deal with emails that they establish a paywall (the charity bit is irrelevant, frankly). And yet obviously they are not actually important/successful enough because otherwise they would have a PA/Secretary acting as gatekeeper. So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly. b) The whole ramming charity donations down your throat thing. Its MY business alone to choose what charities to donate to and how much I donate. I do not need other people, whether chuggers on the street or "gated challenges" attempting to force (or "strongly persuade" if you prefer) me to donate to their chosen cause. c) The whole thing is too fragile anyway. What about your bank/Amazon etc. ? Are they going to have to make a donation before reaching your email ? Good luck with that ! People who think they are "too busy for email" should just setup a "hidden" email instead that you only give the chosen few and that comes straight through to your Inbox, then a second email that goes to some folder you look at as and when, its not rocket science.

jokethrowaway 5y ago
A is why I think this service won't have customers
- doctor_eval 5y ago
  This is what I think when someone asks me to join a meeting by sending me a Calendly link. Even though arranging an acceptable appointment time can be annoying, it’s a little personal to-and-fro that somehow sets the tone. I dunno, maybe I’m just old.
teruakohatu 5y ago
> So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly. I think you are being too harsh. This idea has existed for a long time as a hypothetical way to reduce spam: make the sender pay for postage. The charity aspect is simply a feel-better way to require postage. A cryptocurrency that simply burnt up would also work (but be wasteful to the environment). This would not be used for a primary private personal email account. It would be used for a public email account used by, for example, an open source developer. It would keep signal high and spam low. The real problem I see is that senders, after paying a dollar or two and spending time going through a payment gateway, are going to feel entitled to a response and may get angry when they don't get their money's worth.

imgabe 5y ago

I can’t imagine anyone worth contacting using a service like this.

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

They're taking a 15% fee plus payment processing fees that might be just as high, for a total of 30%: "On average, 15% of each donation covers processing fees (varies by donation size). 15% goes to support Gated as a free service for everyone. The rest (70%) goes to the nonprofit chosen by the Gated user." (For small donations, this can be reasonable, especially if the processing fees are actual third party fees and not padded.) There's also a link that I expect to be heavily abused: "in the Challenge Email, there is a one-click solution for people you know personally to click and have their email delivered immediately." Overall, it's an interesting idea but likely will struggle with the risk of putting off the wrong person (e.g. an important business partner) being too high. https://www.gated.com/blog-posts/sellers-love-gated https://www.gated.com/blog-posts/sellers-love-gated has a screenshot of their challenge e-mail and I think they did find a pretty good wording. Another issue is that this (obviously) requires giving them access to your inbox, which not everyone (and in particular not every company) will be OK with - especially as if they get hacked, the attacker could get those access keys. Can keys be limited so they only have access to metadata? (Even then, metadata + the ability to send e-mail as someone is devastating because it can be used for spear phishing.) In general, I wish e-mail was easily sortable into categories like "response", "entirely human written individual e-mail sent to only me", "human written e-mail sent to a small group of people", "human written e-mail sent to a large group of people", "human e-mail using boilerplate text", "notification about human activity involving something that human wrote somewhere", "notification about anything else", "transactional e-mail", "service announcement", "newsletter", etc.

jsmith99 5y ago
The fee goes to support Gated 'as a free [sic] service for everyone'?
- henriquez 5y ago
  It’s free to visit their homepage. Why split hairs?!
mmmoody 5y ago
Thanks @tgsovlerkhgsel - great thinking here. Love how you categorized those categories - something we're looking at on the back-end for sure. More details (in response to your thoughtful points): - The customizable challenge email is indeed something we're constantly refining, to avoid that issue you pointed out about inbound emails of importance. We're working with some early users to refine this - and most people are happy with how it works. - Users log in with their Google accounts, so all email based control is managed in that way (with permissions revokable at any time)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

unglaublich 5y ago

Sometimes I play around with the concept of e-mail stamps. Sending costs you credit. Receiving earns you credits. That way mass-sending of value-less content will be discouraged. There are many problems with this, but at least it would largely stop the spam game.

octoberfranklin 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
- ricardo81 5y ago
  First thing that came to mind reading this. Was never sure how widely implemented it became.

octoberfranklin 5y ago

I am totally going to use this for receiving DMCA notifications.

plantain 5y ago

These services seem to be increasingly popular, as measured by my support load of tickets from users who are unable to complete the signup flow on my SaaS because they are unable to receive an activation email - or a reply to their ticket...

aetherspawn 5y ago
On a related note.. I use Bitdefender business email security. But this also applies to Sophos Email Security, or something else like it. When you receive an email, all links are replaced with links that bounce through the gateway, which downloads the page first and looks for malicious redirects, scans it for malicious fingerprints, etc. Then it shows you the chain of redirects and there's a button to actually proceed to the site. On some sites, they require you to login to activate the account, and this scan eats up the activation token. So when you click through, it errors up like "this token is already used", and you can't activate your account anymore on the real visit. Happens on enough sites to be annoying.
- scoot 5y ago
  Which also has the effect of making it impossible to spot obviously fraudulent emails from the domain they link to. Not that this is foolproof.
  - Cerium 5y ago
    Yes! And our It department still gives us a mandatory training on how to look at links before clicking.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mkl95 5y ago

> It is not even wrong Wolfgang Pauli

taspeotis 5y ago

> As seen on [ marketing podcasts ] Might as well just elide that entire section it does not inspire confidence.

pxeger1 5y ago

Anyone else find this title unparseable? Even after I realised "Gated" is a proper noun, not an adjective

Ndymium 5y ago
> X challenges (verb) Y to Z in order to reach you where X = Gated, Y = unknown senders, and Z = donate to charity.
- jimmytidey 5y ago
  Only on HN would this count as addressing the point that the title is poorly written.
  - Ndymium 5y ago
    I guess I missed the point, as I provided an example on how to parse it, since it was deemed "unparseable".
- xondono 5y ago
  I still have no idea what the title is about. The “clickbaitiness” of HN posts is increasing, and I don’t like it.
  - Operyl 5y ago
    They filter your email and send challenges to unknown senders that require they donate to charity in order to get their email in your inbox. I agree with your statement (in regards to other articles), but the title is definitely exactly what it is (just confusing because of the product name).
  - jasode 5y ago
    >I still have no idea what the title is about. The “clickbaitiness” of HN posts The post's title isn't clickbait. It's a wording style that simply has many auxiliary verbs and grammar articles removed.[1] Anyway, the same sentence with extra helper words in [] may help in parsing it: "[The company called] Gated [has a junk email filtering service that issues] challenges [to] unknown senders [by forcing them] to donate to charity in order to reach you"* [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style#Headline https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_style#Headline

onion2k 5y ago

I'm not a marketing expert, but I'd like to suggest using the slogan "Keep poor people away with Gated!"

jka 5y ago
And for the next item on the scrolling marquee, I'd suggest "Require approved tribute from mortals before they dare speak within your realm!" (I'm also yet to make much headway in the marketing industry)
amelius 5y ago
They can subscribe as a charity.

itissid 5y ago

Are there exceptions like emails from a whitelist of NGOs and Non Profits?

notimetorelax 5y ago
They mention that they allow emails from your list OR unknown who donated.
mmmoody 5y ago
Gated users have the ability to add any individual emails or entire domains to their Allow List at any time. (Or - conversely - to set status so that they will NOT hear from individuals or domains!) There are also some rules that Gated applies as a default, like not sending Challenge Emails to known bots (noreply@) More details on gated.com/faq! And we love to hear from anyone with other questions --- support@gated.com

amelius 5y ago

So a government institution tries to send me an email, gets this challenge in response. What do you think is going to happen?

einpoklum 5y ago
Not that I support this Gated thing, but: 1. You could have a separate email which you provide people/institutions which don't need to be filtered. 2. You could white-list "*.gov" addresses maybe?
somehnacct3757 5y ago
If the government is cold emailing or calling you, it's a scam. Wait for the letter in the mail. If they're not cold emailing you, they're not an unknown sender.
- amelius 5y ago
  By this logic, I wouldn't need a challenge to begin with. Every legitimate sender would already be in my contacts list.
  - somehnacct3757 5y ago
    My claim is specific to the U.S. government who will never make first contact via email or phone. If you choose to opt-in to digital correspondence then they aren't an unknown sender, and they send you snail mail about that too. It was in response to GP claiming you would miss important government email by using this service. However, there is no such thing as unsolicited important government email.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mmmoody 5y ago

Hi everyone! As Cofounder and Head of Marketing, I really appreciate reading everyone's thoughts and perspectives on what we're building at Gated. We're working to build a solution that gives people back control over their inboxes and attention. And yes, we're trying to solve the problem for everyone - not just people who can afford to pay for it. It's certainly a nuanced space with lots of different perspectives and our team is always happy to answer questions. (I'd also suggest checking the website for more info than you can get in the TC article.)