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?
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.
> 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.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t go round paying for other peoples postage in the physical world.
If you are saying I should pay for emails like I pay for stamps, then as I said, good luck getting banks, Amazon etc on board with that one !! That ship has well and truly sailed !
> a) Implies someone thinks they are too important to deal with emails that they establish a paywall ... So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly.
I don't have a PA (ha!) but I still get a lot of random email from people wanting to get in touch. Especially just after I publish something. And I find it socially overwhelming to respond to everyone - especially when lots of folks seem nice & interesting, and they're asking to schedule a zoom chat or something. I like a lot of those conversations when we have them - but scheduling and socializing really takes it out of me. And that means less coding time, which costs.
I suspect making people donate $1 to a charity in order to reach me would help cut down almost all of the traffic. Gosh, I'd enable that on linkedin in a heartbeat if I could. If everyone who messaged me on linkedin first paid $5 to a charity for the privilege first, I might even check my linkedin messages.
But for email, my worry is that it would filter out the interesting people, and leave the pushiest and most entitled people in my inbox. Probably leave them feeling even more entitled to my time.
> So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly.
I wouldn't characterize introvert tenancies + social overwhelm from strangers as "arrogance". To briefly reframe it, nobody is entitled to my time no matter how nicely worded their email is, or how much effort they put in to a pull request. My attention is my own to direct. If you're a stranger to me, basic civility doesn't demand I reply to your email, or publish my email address at all. I often do reply; but the decision (and the rules) are up to me (the receiver). Not up to the sender.
> If everyone who messaged me on linkedin first paid $5 to a charity for the privilege first, I might even check my linkedin messages.
See, I think the opposite: If it cost $5 to e-mail me, I suspect every e-mail would be from someone who expected the interaction to produce cash profit for them.
> Implies someone thinks they are too important to deal with emails that they establish a paywall (the charity bit is irrelevant, frankly)
But I am too important to deal with emails from people I don't care about. Even if I were living paycheck to paycheck, it wouldn't mean I have time for bullshit from marketers, cold callers, recruiters who guessed my mail and people trying to sell tech to my company.
And even if I the person donated, I would probably just delete any spam email anyway.
I honestly wish there was a fine for spammers and cold callers to deter them, and would totally vote for candidates proposing it.
> Its MY business alone to choose what charities to donate to and how much I donate
Then don't send me an email, simple as that. Delete the donation request and move in with your life.
Why are you entitled to bothering me and is arguing for it, but when I do the same for you it's suddenly "YOUR business"?
> People who think they are "too busy for email" should
Entitled people like you, who get angry about people who are "too busy for email", should just realize that nobody owes you their time.
I’ve had this feature to avoid random bots and scammers from contacting me in EVE Online since 2006 or so. On there you can adjust the amount. Why not on real email, if it has existed in a dumb spaceship and spreadsheets game for over a decade?
The charity thing is honestly kind of weird, like maybe you’re gonna get people who want to email you but under no circumstances want to donate to Planned Parenthood or the ACLU or something (although Silicon Valley types might consider that a feature, not a bug). Or, because I feel my tone is unfairly targeting progressives, would someone be okay if the Gate email was donating to some pro-life nonprofit?
You’re dead on with what charities you donate to being a very personal thing.
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 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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
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).
>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"*
Debatable, it’s definitely written that way here on HN because not knowing what’s about triggers our curiosity. Is the educated version of “You won’t believe what happened next”.
I had trouble with it too. I think it's because if you read it as a newspaper headline you expect it to be two sentences, broken after the first three words. "Gated challenges unknown. Senders to donate to charity in order to reach you."
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
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.)
56 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadTwo 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.
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.
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.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t go round paying for other peoples postage in the physical world.
If you are saying I should pay for emails like I pay for stamps, then as I said, good luck getting banks, Amazon etc on board with that one !! That ship has well and truly sailed !
I don't have a PA (ha!) but I still get a lot of random email from people wanting to get in touch. Especially just after I publish something. And I find it socially overwhelming to respond to everyone - especially when lots of folks seem nice & interesting, and they're asking to schedule a zoom chat or something. I like a lot of those conversations when we have them - but scheduling and socializing really takes it out of me. And that means less coding time, which costs.
I suspect making people donate $1 to a charity in order to reach me would help cut down almost all of the traffic. Gosh, I'd enable that on linkedin in a heartbeat if I could. If everyone who messaged me on linkedin first paid $5 to a charity for the privilege first, I might even check my linkedin messages.
But for email, my worry is that it would filter out the interesting people, and leave the pushiest and most entitled people in my inbox. Probably leave them feeling even more entitled to my time.
> So its basically arrogance mixed with an inability to manage their time correctly.
I wouldn't characterize introvert tenancies + social overwhelm from strangers as "arrogance". To briefly reframe it, nobody is entitled to my time no matter how nicely worded their email is, or how much effort they put in to a pull request. My attention is my own to direct. If you're a stranger to me, basic civility doesn't demand I reply to your email, or publish my email address at all. I often do reply; but the decision (and the rules) are up to me (the receiver). Not up to the sender.
See, I think the opposite: If it cost $5 to e-mail me, I suspect every e-mail would be from someone who expected the interaction to produce cash profit for them.
But I am too important to deal with emails from people I don't care about. Even if I were living paycheck to paycheck, it wouldn't mean I have time for bullshit from marketers, cold callers, recruiters who guessed my mail and people trying to sell tech to my company.
And even if I the person donated, I would probably just delete any spam email anyway.
I honestly wish there was a fine for spammers and cold callers to deter them, and would totally vote for candidates proposing it.
> Its MY business alone to choose what charities to donate to and how much I donate
Then don't send me an email, simple as that. Delete the donation request and move in with your life.
Why are you entitled to bothering me and is arguing for it, but when I do the same for you it's suddenly "YOUR business"?
> People who think they are "too busy for email" should
Entitled people like you, who get angry about people who are "too busy for email", should just realize that nobody owes you their time.
The charity thing is honestly kind of weird, like maybe you’re gonna get people who want to email you but under no circumstances want to donate to Planned Parenthood or the ACLU or something (although Silicon Valley types might consider that a feature, not a bug). Or, because I feel my tone is unfairly targeting progressives, would someone be okay if the Gate email was donating to some pro-life nonprofit?
You’re dead on with what charities you donate to being a very personal thing.
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 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.
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)
There are many problems with this, but at least it would largely stop the spam game.
Was never sure how widely implemented it became.
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.
Wolfgang Pauli
Might as well just elide that entire section it does not inspire confidence.
where X = Gated, Y = unknown senders, and Z = donate to charity.
The “clickbaitiness” of HN posts is increasing, and I don’t like it.
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
Debatable, it’s definitely written that way here on HN because not knowing what’s about triggers our curiosity. Is the educated version of “You won’t believe what happened next”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence
(I'm also yet to make much headway in the marketing industry)
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
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?
If they're not cold emailing you, they're not an unknown sender.
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.
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?
- 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.