Would you pay to be able email someone? \ stacker news ~lightning

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555 sats \ 27 comments \ @Scoresby 15h lightning

Some time ago, I needed to get in touch with the illustrious @supertestnet. Going to his website, I found a contact form.

Today, I saw Stephen Delorme ask on X:

So, would you consider paying someone for the ability to send them an email?

Yes63.6%

No36.4%

33 votes \ 8h left

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219 sats \ 5 replies \ @optimism 15h

Thanks for giving me a Sunday laugh.

PS: sounds extremely narcissistic to do this, so no. I'll just carry on without ya; your loss for missing the train.

154 sats \ 4 replies \ @Scoresby OP 14h

What about the context of someone who receives a lot of email fr a lot of randos (ie a popular journalist or the head of a medium-large company) - maybe it only applies to an email address you expose on the web. It would allow you to enforce a threshold of seriousness for such an address. I could see this being valuable.

109 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 14h

My private email leaked in 2010. Normal day 200 or so emails not counting automated crap. I don't read these, at all, and I don't understand why anyone still emails me. Sometimes i open the app and then I'm quickly cured when I see the unread stat. My business emails have whitelisted inboxes.

My security list email is the only one I have open 24/7. 95% is scams / slop / subpar journalists. I scan it quickly and then archive everything that isn't relevant. Of the 5% that I don't throw out immediately, another 95% is not actionable and bullshit.

Now, if you want to get my attention, you have my number. If you have my number you can send me a message on the appropriate app. If you're not one of the 5 whitelisted people on there, I will not notice that you're messaging me until I look. So you have to wait too.

Allowing people to buy my attention just means they feel self-important. I decide, not your money. You rich? Good, go spend it on something useful and leave me the fuck alone.

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 13h

I decide, not your money.

This is a pretty awesome statement. Well said. Still, there is some point at which if you receive enough volume of spam, it is too much of a burden to sift through it all.

I am not a famous personage. Few people want to get in touch with me. Even so, my X DMs are destroyed with scam messages. So much so that I rarely really check them thoroughly because checking them means scrolling through endless Occasionally, I have missed messages from real people who I would have liked to interact with.

Email is slightly different (mostly because spam filters are pretty good) - but my wife had the experience where the tech support at her company was incompetent and managed to screw up their email so that messages from their domain got sent to spam in most clients.

I can see pay to email or DM as a hacky kind of solution to systems that don't work great right now.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 13h

What about client-side filtering though? Like on nostr? Does that help?

209 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 14h

Data brokers are a real danger out there. Many of so called "spam emails" could be also a more complicated phishing or attack on somebody. Making them to pay is a way to slow them down or even stop those that do not afford or want to get into bitcoin.

People should listen this good episode of Darknet Diaries about data brokers: https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/162/

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @Fenix 7h

SN way to deal with spam

107 sats \ 4 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 15h

YES, as long as it's a small amount, not like 5k or 1k!

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @ken 15h

Lol @ 5,000 sats to message this guy

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 15h

It's not about the person, I'm just saying this because the value is crazy high. But hey, everyone's free to set their own price.

33 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 14h

5k is high. But on the other hand, if you really want to get in touch with someone, maybe you can be sure they will see it at that rate.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 14h

Honestly, there's no guarantee of that.

173 sats \ 4 replies \ @grayruby 15h

Good way to root out spam.

I am not sure it works in an enterprise situation though. I would have people I didn't know emailing me all the time about things when I ran my business. I would usually have one or two point of contacts for a client but people go on vacation, leave etc. Not every customer is going to email you to say please whitelist this address.

Plus if I handed out my business card to someone in the hopes they email me I don't want to miss their email because I might be missing out on potential business.

40 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 15h

You can setup your email server to reply with an NDR (non-delivery report) message to all blacklisted domains/emails with a specific message to pay a LN invoice in order to be whitelisted.

I did that on my private email domain, where only specific people can email me. All the rest... make them pay.

Corporate email servers can be configured easily like that.

20 sats \ 1 reply \ @Fenix 7h

Very interesting. How did you know what email address you have to whitelist?

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 3h

Ir's simple: only those you give them your email or you alrwady have them as personal contacts. You create a base whitelist in your email server config and slowly you build it.

Keep in mind: spam is also coming even from gmail itself. Exampke: you sent an email from your personal domain to a gmail address. Gmail automatically sell that info to data brokers. Your petsonal domain is automatically in hands of data brokers.

Another method is to give free email accounts to your family, friends, close business partners, from your own email server. That way you keep everuthing under control.

40 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 14h

There's probably a difference between an address intended for sales/marketing and an address intended for other communication.

I agree that it doesn't make sense in the sales/marketing world.

But if you are someone who isn't looking for new business necessarily, it sets a threshold for getting in front of you and taking up attention.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @OT 11h

Yes, but not 5k sats! I'd pay up to 1k sats.

I remember Jack Mallers talking about this a fee years ago.

120 sats \ 0 replies \ @justin_shocknet 12h

Placed in a hackathon in 2019 as a plugin for Gmail

Was never demand for a service but might have been a little early

https://devpost.com/software/charged-mail?_gl=1*xwvgjz*_gcl_au*MTM2OTExNzQyNS4xNzU4NDg4MTA0*_ga*MTU1NzM2NjU2OS4xNzU4NDg4MTA1*_ga_0YHJK3Y10M*czE3NTg0ODgxMDQkbzEkZzEkdDE3NTg0ODgxMzQkajMwJGwwJGgw

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @2053456d48 14h

Depending on the circumstances and importance or emergency purposes, maybe considering for payment to send an email.

Else, I think it's some I won't in my case.

169 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 15h

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @beameduplol 15h

I like the idea of it, but only in micropayment terms, not in "I will now make a secondary income by charging users 0.0001 BTC per email"

Some of these amounts are too much. Good way to get around spam though, maybe even fork out and create an "anonymous" messaging system that costs 21 sats.

Don't add a board to it aswell or else you get stacker.news 2 hahaha

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @jbschirtzinger 15h

Absolutely not. I'd just use the postal system.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @398ja 2h

Before joining coinbase as CTO, Balaji S. was running a product doing something similar... (I can't remember the name, but it was acquired by coinbase as well and may have been discontinued or repurposed)

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SwapMarket 10h

no sats, but proof of work is a reasonable hurdle

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @88b0c423eb 13h

Just run your own email server

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nitter 15h

https://xcancel.com/StephenDeLorme/status/1969821526016110708