Ok I'll give you my idea. I hate one aspect of email: all the spam/solicitations that websites love to bombard me with. Meetup.com is a particular egregious ex

Ok I'll give you my idea. I hate one aspect of email: all the spam/solicitations that websites love to bombard me with. Meetup.com is a particular egregious example, being next to impossible to unsubscribe from. Also, not all emails are equal. Emails from friends, family, or colleagues are important and should be treated on the same notification level as texts. But notifications emails from spammy websites set off the same notifications. I probably check my phone 90% of the time only to find out someone liked my post on <insert-social-network-here>. It's gotten to the point where I have to use multiple email addresses to register for websites. My idea: A regulated email exchange. Each email account gets 10-50 tokens. Whenever someone emails you, they attach their token. As recipient, you can then choose whether to return the token or not. Keeping the token means that sender can't send you any more emails until you return the token. Returning the token means you acknowledge the email sender is legitimate and not a spammer. Also, the less tokens a sender has, the less spammy emails they can send out. When they hit zero tokens, they're effectively dead in the water. The idea is to cut down on all the BS, unnecessary emails and raise the quality of sent emails. In short: users exchange tokens with other users they want to interact with. users withhold tokens from other users they don't want to interact with. spammy websites have a lot less ammo with which to bombard users with.