Show HN: Veropost – Charge people to send you email | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Veropost – Charge people to send you email

veropost.com

45 pointsagora77838 comments

Hi people, project developer here

I built this to solve a specific problem. Ordinary people cannot cold email someone that is "out of their league". My vision is to have someone like Angelina Jolie responding to emails for a $200 donation to Unicef for example. How to actually make it happen is another subject but the implementation is here :) Bitcoin currently solves complexity, I hope to expand it to fiat soon.

P.S I get questions about 21.co, my site was up on September 2016...

It's really great because "vero post" in Latin means "after you". Like a courtesy, or good will, which is sort of what this site is facilitating.

to be honest I thought vero means true from verus so the meaning is true mail :) I like your interpretation too though

haha glad you like it but yours is maybe more appropriate. mine was just from Googling for "vero post" noticing latin results then doing a Google translate on it. :)

It is one form of verus, yeah.

Neat. I had a similar idea a few years ago. A few questions I just thought of:

- How many people want to send $200 emails?

- How many celebs (or even mildly internet-famous people) want to manage yet another communications channel?

- Does this disincentivize communication on other channels? If so, what are the ramifications of that?

I suppose these questions fit under "how to make it happen," but I'm curious. Good job and good luck!

Super good questions. I wish I had all the answers and I hope the system unfolds in a such a way that answers will come along the way. That's Agile :)

Do you plan to create a charge-on-reply option, or to stick with charge-on-delivery? I'm curious as to the rationale behind that choice.

This is tricky. If receiver has sender's email (cause that's how it goes because I don't want to make people create accounts) he can reply back directly going round veropost. In that case we run the service for free. If we want to track answers everything needs to be through our servers and I don't want to create gmail, just a front. I am not resistant to change though if there is demand for that.

> I don't want to create gmail, just a front.

Excellent point.

If you did decide you wanted everything to go through your servers down the road, you could perhaps set up a private `replyto:` address for each recipient, which would automatically forward responses to the sender, similar to how Craigslist does it.

I suspect anyone important enough to need a service like this would likely care far more about the filtration benefit than the revenue. I'd rather set a lower fee, then pick and choose the most interesting messages to reply to. But if I knew every sender had already paid for the privledge, I might feel obliged to reply to them all.

My guess is that important people would have enough money to not care about fee and chose to donate directly which is possible on the site. It sounds better anyways unless you are providing a service

I respect what you're doing here man, thoughtful and interesting!

I guess it's time to dig out the good old spam solution checklist (https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt) again.

I've already filled it in for this case: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/joepie91/d06939ead53bba9f...

This is interesting, but I'm a bit confused as who the target audience is, general public or famous celebs.

In terms of general public use, usually we cannot afford to discourage people from sending us emails. Automated emails are also caught by spam detectors.

In terms of VCs, if they charge money, it would feel like an admission process and I'd prefer it to be a more formal process rather than an email which they might or might not read/reply to. Same applies to lawyers. Also usually cold emails would be read by assistants/receptionists, so not sure if this model would fit them.

In case of famous celebs, it could be a great way to raise money for great causes while managing your fans.

Personally I'd rather it somehow address my issue of handling emails coming into my inbox. But that's in a different nature, usually emails I get aren't spams and they are real emails which I need to actually respond to, but the priority is not clear.

To be fair, this might be an actual use case for proof of work. Do some CPU work that is trivial to check but expensive to compute. Set the difficulty of your inbox and just have your SMTP server bouncy any email without an attached bit of "work". I can wait a few minutes for an email to send.

Something like this was already done with hashcash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Oh look. A good idea.

you do this by acquiring bitcoins right? :)

Ahhh, yet another "Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem" [0].

[0]: https://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html

I think maybe the word spam is not what I should be using for this project as if I write a message to Elon Musk asking him something I am not spamming but my email will not get through as if I donate let's say 1K first to his org of choice he will read it. Any ideas of how to rephrase it?

I think what "spam" means to most of us is automated mail that we don't want to see. I remember in the days before gmail I saw people set up auto-responders with captcha-like replies. Even that tiny extra validation step was too much friction. So I guess the people who will find this useful are those that are getting too much mail that an actual human is spending to time to write? Definitely not for me, I could see a business mail, HR/recruiting or something similar but you will probably lose them all unfortunately as soon as they see "bitcoin".

With the explanation about high profile people it makes sense. For the rest of us there is the chicken-egg problem. I can't afford to deny all emails not send through that system. I whished I could charge a micro-payment for it, like 3 cents, just to keep spam away.

Why not charge a very small amount like $1? Do you see any problems with that?

Depending on your financial background $1 could already be quite a bit. I'd prefer to charge just "not nothing" which should be below 50c for me. Preferably below the costs of a text (costs ~9c here).

The bigger problem however is what ever the procedure for signig up is. Even if it's just paypal and a webform for the mail.

I guess the problem you'd see with that is exactly how this service is differentiated. Yes, it blocks spam ( but so do many other things ), but that's more of a side effect.

It's really about purchasing access to busy people. As you say.

That's an understanding I have anyway. Please correct it if it's missing something.

Why not use reCAPTCHA? It will filter out most the spam.

The idea is a bit different from that, the point is to have a way to email VCs or famous actors, recaptcha just blocks bots.

I know! I was just pitched the idea because the OP seems to not be "famous" from what he's saying, but he still seems to have that problem.

I signed up but the email verification link (https://api.veropost.com/fn/emailVerify?token=58e6...) gives a "Server not found" error.

wow thank you will solve it immediately

Is the video cut off? It ends quite abruptly and sounds like there should be more to the question

So for a company, you redirect all the incoming emails under an alias for cold emails to your service and then get them back filtered?

yes exactly. you set the price you want. I guess big Venture Capital firms would set it pretty high and a kind of famous lawyer would set it also high.

Is it possible to view emails that haven't been paid for so you can check whether there's something important?

Currently no, that would be an idea though I can implement it if there is interest.But then why would you give out this account and not your gmail if you want to manual go through them? Kind of defeats purpose?

I don't give out my email at all really, but still some stuff arrives so it would be good to be able to see whether I want to read it anyway, even if the only preview is the from address.

I have it shown as xxx@xxx.xx currently so you can see that you have unpaid emails, I can do it like you propose sure good idea.

This is THE BIGGEST MONEY MAKING IDEA IN TECHNOLOGY full stop. The money that will be made around this will make Adwords look like a cute hobby. Messaging on all channels needs to be assigned a variable cost. ...and this implementation is thoughtful/interesting, as is 21.co... Google, Facebook and Microsoft have understood this is coming for a long time. That's why Microsoft bought Linkedin, and FB bought Whatsapp. Companies are spending billions to prepare for this future, but I have yet to hear anyone elucidate how this paid communication future will actually work. Further, since the patent system has been eviscerated there isn't any incentive for an entrepreneur to solve the whole problem... and Google and many other tech companies only know how to copy good ideas... not generate their own. So your reward for starting a company that solves this will likely be lawsuits, poverty and personal and professional devastation. Who is gonna step up ;)

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