HN Explorer

Ask HN: Interest in a service that lets you charge others to send you email?

2 points by malandrew ↗ HN
So, it's pretty clear that email is a huge time vampire for anyone remotely important. It's simply too easy for others to send you email these days. The only barrier is two clicks: (1) click new email button, (2) click send.

Who on HN would be interested in a paid email service? Not one where you pay for email, but where you set up contact groups and a price that that group must pay to send you an email.

So for example, I may have a group called family, where I charge my family members 25 cents each to send me an email. I may have another group that are close friends that I may also charge 25 cents. I may have another group called acquaintances that I charge $1 dollar. For people that I don't have in my address book I charge $5 dollars.

Other potential features:

-- charge people by the 100 characters of text they send you.

-- give each person in certain groups a weekly or monthly quota. i.e. family members are allowed 3 free emails per month.

The basic idea is that time equals money and therefore reading email costs you money. This would allow you to recoup that money and also reduce the amount of time you waste in email by intentionally reducing conversion by charging people and adding more than two clicks to the task of sending email.

Would this be interesting to HNers?

5 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 23.8 ms ] thread
bubbafat
This has been researched fairly thoroughly for the last 10 years or so as an anti-spam measure.

If a family member tried to charge me to send them email they would get exactly one ... and it wouldn't take too long to read both words.

mindcrime
Honestly, I doubt this will go anywhere. For one, it's been tried already and didn't catch on. Secondly, if it did have any chance of succeeding, I really think it would require a widely accepted and usable micro-payments system, which we still don't have. Maybe we're closer to that than we were 10 years ago, but it's still difficult / awkward to deal with very small transaction amounts. Also, it simply adds friction to the process that is going to result in you not getting the emails you do want. Or, when you do get the emails, they're going to be filled with unpleasant phrases and unkind suggestions for where to go.

Finally, do family members even use email anymore? At least in my family, my mom, sister, aunt and cousins all either text me, or just post to my Facebook wall. I can't remember the last proper email I got from anybody in my family. Now maybe my family is atypical, who knows?

anigbrowl
If you're serious, you could purchase bribe.me and be reasonably assured of some media coverage when you launch. I think virtual secretarial services would be a better business model.
us
This idea is not worth it