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Comment by dwedge | Hacker News Reader

This mostly assumes that the only one benefiting from the email exchange in the sender. If that's the case, just close your email account.

A few years ago I emailed a local freelancer I'd met in person, because I had a client asking for coding (which was more his bag than mine). I got an automated response that he was using something like this, with a link to some third party service to fill out a form and click a captcha if I wanted him to see my email.

Why would I? I just told the client sorry, I don't know anyone.

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I always liked the idea of a micro-deposit that the sender puts up for each email (say $0.001). If the recipient blocks your email and it ends up in their spam folder then you lose your deposit; if they read it then you get your deposit back.

The lost deposits would then be used to pay for the infrastructure.

valid point. I feel for many people the amount of inbound is just not bearable anymore with ai. Yet these people cannot close their account, either. This is basically an idea to increase the inbound friction for exactly these people.

do you have a take on how one could upp the relevancy of emails so that people can actually manage their inbound? Or any other open channel that is getting flooded, for that matter?

I also realised a while ago that most emails are just transactional now (password resets, how well did we do the thing you paid us to do?), so I do similar to you without the sender input and it more or less works. Breaks down like this:

- Nobody gets into my inbox unless whitelisted address. Instead of fighting spam and blacklisting, I know my inbox is always from someone I want to hear from.

- Every other email goes through spam assassin (which is getting worse) and then into a folder called Transactional (and if it makes a mistake, I add to the whitelist)

- I have another folder SpamAssassin where I move spam, and it gets pushed back through sa-learn

- Finally, I have a cronjob that goes through the email in Transaction and looks for subjects, senders, sending domains or to addresses that have a) been received at least 5 times and b) are only in the spam folder.

So kind of the same idea as you. But I think I'd feel really pretentious using this system and assume that quite a lot of people just rolled their eyes and ignored the rejection.

this sounds really similar to how the tool works and processes emails, too.

Would you feel this would be more helpful if the tool just silently manages the emails and does not send any replies to the original sender then?

Look, this is HN it's not the typical technical ability or email needs. Just because I wouldn't use this doesn't mean nobody would.

You've made it, try it, maybe people will find enough benefit here to pay you.

The paradox is that the person most likely to do extra work is the person you want to hear from least. If someone felt the need to pay (for example) $5,000 to talk to me, it's probably because they don't feel they have a chance of getting my attention otherwise. I'd also never pay someone 5 grand if I'm the one offering them something.

A Captcha isn't 5 grand, but I think the same principle applies. If I'm putting a request for proposal to 10 vendors, I'll probably disqualify the one that makes me verify that I'm a human. It's not like I'm short of qualified companies.

I haven't received any AI spam. You don't need an LLM to spam people.

Good spam filters should be enough to get rid of spam without annoying people who email you.

It's not my email that has an unbearable spam issue. I can't take all the incessant phone spam anymore, though. Even setting it to go straight to voicemail, the calls are relentless. They've switched to texts now, too.

Miserable lot that serves no purpose in life.

I get about 10 AI generated spam emails a day that get through my spam filter. It takes about 10 seconds to block and mark as spam. I barely read the first three words of each.

> I get about 10 AI generated spam emails a day that get through my spam filter.

Yikes, that's sounds unworkable for a lot of people! Most people in here are techies and use email all the time, but some use cases (say, contractors who are mostly out in jobs) people might only sit down in front of emails properly once a week. 70 emails is a mammoth waste.of resources to have flooding your inbox in that kind of context.

I am saying that 70 emails would be 70 seconds of time, so not a big deal. I can usually tell from the sender that it won’t be real and it takes just a couple of words to prove that. The good thing is that they tend to get to the point quickly, which works in my favor.

Do you often sign up for new services using your actual email? In gmail, I get spam in my primary mailbox maybe once every few months, usually after I've signed up for something. After marking mails as spam a few times, they are usually sent to the spambox automatically and I have a tidy primary inbox again for a long time.

Especially if you signed up for something, rather than just unsubscribing marking it as spam is a dickish move given that it has the potential of that mail also being filtered for people wanting to receive it.

If you don't want that you'll have to make your marketing emails opt-in instead of opt-out after signup is complete. If I have to disable a ton of auto-enabled marketing options on every page, you deserve to be listed as spammer.

I’m sure the source is LinkedIn ultimately. They reference my job and things from there and pretend to have carefully considered my posts (just LLM generated BS)

Easy, set a filter with only contacts get through, everything else lands on junk.

Every now and then update the contacts with key emails that might have been lost.

Working quite fine since 2000's.

It's hard to say whether you're missing out on legit emails from new senders or old senders with new addresses unless you review your spam folder regularly.

Yes, once a week is enough.

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