This article is completely hyperbolic, and seems to intentionally misunderstand what the goal of a service like Earn is (was?), based solely on a single one of their users having forgotten to add a newsletter to their allowlist.

For me, email _needs_ to be an allowlist by default. At this point, pretty much _all_ communication channels, be it calls, sms, or physical mail, need to be allowlist by default. There are too many people out there willing to do shitty scattershot marketing or exploit phishing for me to want to open my inbox to the world.

Earn, it seems, did it, and I wish they'd kept doing it long enough for me to hear about it. The fact that they then extended the allowlist into an "allowlist-or-pay-for-my-attention" is a neat feature that I probably would have enabled without much expectation of any real results. The real feature for me is the allowlist-by-default.

So yeah, this author is a dingus, Earn may well have _saved_ email if they'd succeeded, and I hope someone else tries.