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Comment by spruce_tips | Hacker News Reader

I built a side project to solve this for myself that’s basically an inbox toll system. It funnels emails from unknown senders into a hidden mailbox and auto replies to the sender with a payment link. After the sender pays, the email gets released to recipient’s main inbox. Recipient can set custom toll amounts, whitelist, etc.

Would be happy to share the code, just lmk!

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Has anyone ever paid you?

The technical side of this seems easy enough. The human side, that seems more complicated.

Like, if I were your doctor or contractor or kid's schoolteacher or whoever you hadn't happened to already whitelist, and had sent you something important for you, and got that back as a response... I'm sure as heck not paying when I'm trying to send you something for your benefit.

Yeah, meanwhile a scammer will actually pay to have a seal of approval.

It's a great way to stop receiving anything that benefits yourself and only start receiving mail which could make the sender way more than $1

> Yeah, meanwhile a scammer will actually pay to have a seal of approval.

No they won't. Especially not automated spam. They'd just get farmed by people creating millions of fake e-mail addresses.

no one paid me but didnt really have this running for very long on my inbox. was really just a poc. and you're right - the human side is weird. surprisingly hard to solve the "real human, not spam, that's also an email address you see for the first time" scenarios, which there are many of - even with LLMs

I’m interested in seeing this too. Heh an agent will gladly pay a dollar of their human’s money if they can declare success.

https://github.com/JoeBerg8/tollbooth

this was part of a little saas tool i was building (since retired it) so spent some time today having an LLM help me pull it into a headless service. far from perfect but sharing anyway. details in readme!