Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BLKNSLVR | Hacker News Reader

Email is an ignorable communication medium. It has lost relevance due to its ubiquity, which led to its overuse, which led to its redundancy.

There are a lot of stragglers that haven't realized it's redundancy yet, and madly spend a significant percentage of their time and effort organizing this pulsating mass of ever-changing chaos.

If you keep replying, they'll keep asking.

Cut it down to a quick squizz once a day and get in with the actual productive work.

(My experience written as universal. I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are)

Edited to add: you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item. If something comes in via email, there's little to no likelihood that it should be jumping to the top of the pile (email is not a real-time communication platform, and people who think it is should be corrected). An email is like the first pangs of hunger: at least 24 hours from becoming important.

> I'm aware there are some important emails - but I challenge that there aren't as many as you think there are

The problem is not whether I think it's important. The problem is the customer thinking that's important. Or simply that I need to be aware of what they wrote. Or that I need to be aware of what another vendor wrote.

I'm not saying this is right, I'm saying it's where I'm currently sitting at.

"you can only work on one thing at a time. It should always be the highest priority item"

The thing you're working on in any given moment is the highest priority thing (in "your" mind) by definition though. If you thought something else was higher priority, you would be doing it instead.

The only "argument" against that requires a third party who deems a different thing higher priority than what you're currently working on, and that leading to a mismatch of what is "highest" priority is, and you're lack of doing it in the moment.

That is idiotic advice. Email is absolutely not ignorable in any real business. We constantly receive important emails from customers / partners / vendors. If we ignored them then we would fail, and deservedly so. They have to be actioned quickly and with careful attention to detail.

I want to sign up for a service that charges people a penny to deliver an email to me -- otherwise the email is undeliverable. Even a minor cost to delivery will dramatically reduce spam.

Micropayments are the next big thing after fusion power...

Proof-of-work was originally proposed precisely for email (specifically spam), by Dwork and Naor back in 1993!

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

I thought about it so much that I started to get an mail api on one of my servers to thinking of implement it but it has some serious flaws

Firstly, the fact that either you are mentioning that there is directory of lists where your email is shown and then the cost of it (lets say a penny) which I assume would become targets of spams so not really worth it

And the other when the other person already has your email and it requires them to send a penny to you to just send it to you but that feels as if an extreme restriction and if you are already facing something like this, then at this point, you probably shouldn't read the messages or create better filters than a penny cost since a penny might not impact spammers but how are you gonna show that it costs a penny for an average person and the average fees of things would make it harder

Honestly at this point a better idea could honestly be to have a signal or matrix or anything where people can message you since it can have higher friction and if someone wants to send you a message, they can send it there as an example as compared to lets say mail.

I still didn't understand the purpose of microtransactions and I thought about it for half an hour but this does feel like it doesn't have much use case. Let me know what you think.

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