[HN Gopher] Earn.com will ruin email if it succeeds (2018)
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Earn.com will ruin email if it succeeds (2018)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-10-28 20:11 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (scribe.rip)
(TXT) w3m dump (scribe.rip)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > Email is open, and incredibly valuable because it is open. A
| model like this threatens to close it
|
| Phones were also open. Now no one answers calls from strangers
| because of the proliferation of spam calls.
|
| This is a natural solution to spam and nothing to be enraged
| about. It is ridiculous but not for you to dictate how other
| people manage how you contact them.
| dddnzzz334 wrote:
| That comparison doesn't make any sense.
|
| Earn.com was making people go through them in order to contact
| whoever used its service. It completely killed the open nature
| of email where if you had someone's email you could be sure the
| message directly reaches him. It was then his choice if he
| chose to read your mail or not.
| thrill wrote:
| Earn wasn't _making_ anyone use their service.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I'm not sure exactly how earn.com worked, but when I
| implemented this for my own email, all such emails would go
| to a "quarantine" folder until the sender responded to the
| autogenerated email.
|
| So yes, the sender's email _did_ get to me. Thankfully, I
| would be blissfully unaware of it until the sender confirms
| they 're human. The sender needs to do it only once. There's
| a great chance that if the sender is not willing to go
| through that hoop, that they are not someone whose email I
| want to read.
|
| This isn't "killing" the open nature of email. As designed,
| the email was delivered to me. I just added a workflow to it.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| spam calls are also a solution we know the answer to, at least
| in part, but small carries played the small biz card to buy
| their corrupt operations some time:
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/us-hits-anti-rob...
|
| "The requirement also doesn't yet apply to small phone
| companies because carriers with 100,000 or fewer customers were
| given until June 30, 2023 to comply. The FCC is seeking comment
| on a plan to make that deadline June 30, 2022 instead because
| "evidence demonstrates that a subset of small voice service
| providers appear to be originating a high number of calls
| relative to their subscriber base and are also generating a
| high and increasing share of illegal robocalls compared to
| larger providers."
| Factorium wrote:
| Australia has mostly solved spam phone calls with a 'Do Not
| Call' register:
|
| https://www.donotcall.gov.au/consumers/register-your-
| numbers....
|
| I can see the USA has the same thing:
| https://www.donotcall.gov/
|
| Does it not work?
| technothrasher wrote:
| Doesn't work at all. Most spam calls are from overseas using
| throw away voip accounts. Do not call just gets ignored.
| Factorium wrote:
| So why not regulate US carriers to block those calls? Or to
| make it more difficult to obtain the US VOIP number in the
| first place?
| d4mi3n wrote:
| Slightly different issue. In my experience, the problem tends
| to be from robodialers operating on behalf of scammers or
| fly-by-night marketing agencies. As the US phone system is
| currently operated, it's trivial for these kinds of actors to
| spoof originating phone numbers and hit every valid US phone
| number in sequence.
| epc wrote:
| No. It is not a block list. It only applies to US based
| organizations who decide to honor it. It does nothing to
| prevent international callers from using (or forging) a US
| based number to very urgently talk to you about your lapsed
| car warranty or your Microsoft Windows error.
| randomhodler84 wrote:
| No, because most of the spam calls in US are actually
| criminal fraud, eg: extended warranty. Australia carved out
| enough exemptions for their DNC registry to make it less
| useful. Political parties can spam you via phone whenever
| they like.
| foobarian wrote:
| It does not work because it is trivial to fake the source
| number.
|
| A popular form of spam pretends to call from a phone number
| very similar to yours (they use the same leading 6 digits) to
| make it look like a neighbor is calling.
|
| Hopefully the STIR/SHAKEN implementation will widen and this
| will be put to bed.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > Does it not work?
|
| It's ineffective against true spam calls, as it only binds
| law-abiding callers with a presence in the US.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| The UK also has a series of anti-spam and anti-solicitation
| measures (see this by ofcom, our communications regulator:
| https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-telecoms-and-
| internet/advice...). They are very effective, many people are
| educated on reporting so even out of jurisdiction offenders
| (e.g windows has an issue, or the more recent parcel fee
| texts) are shut down pretty quickly. We are currently passing
| (or have passed) some measures to make the service provider
| liable for out of jurisdiction calls and texts.
|
| The major issue we are not addressing is 'legal scams'.
| Charities harassing old people, tradesmen faking issues to
| the uneducated - that kind of thing.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > This is a natural solution to spam
|
| "You'll only pay if you get a response."
|
| How does this do anything about spam, then?
| teddyh wrote:
| > _Phones were also open. Now no one answers calls from
| strangers because of the proliferation of spam calls._
|
| I used to get at least a couple of spam calls each year, but I
| don't think I've gotten any this past year. I have no filtering
| or app. Of course, I don't live in the USA.
| lnanek2 wrote:
| Seems an odd thing to be infuriated about. Like, some people have
| no email address, right? Should we be infuriated about that? No?
| Then why are we infuriated about people with an email address
| with a whitelist? It doesn't stop you from having an open email
| address if you want. It's their choice.
|
| Personally, it sounds pretty handy. Every day my personal email
| address gets 100 messages. The only reason I check it is once
| every week or two my family might have sent something. Whitelist
| sounds perfect. As it is I just open Gmail, search for my
| family's address, and close it if nothing shows up. The Gmail
| icon on my phone has 9,714 unread messages...never gonna go
| through all that.
| vvilliamperez wrote:
| Sounds like the user intentionally set up Earn instead of
| unsubscribing to hundreds of newsletters. Seems like it's working
| just fine.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I'm pretty sure Earn.com was working exactly as intended, right
| down to the induction of impotent rage in the newsletter sender.
|
| There should be more services like this.
| jszymborski wrote:
| A little off-topic, but this makes me wonder... what if sending
| email required a very small amount of currency (crypto or fiat)
| to be sent to escrow. If the receiver decides the email was
| unsolicited or unwelcome, you would lose that currency (burn it
| or redistribute it amongst everyone participating).
|
| The value can even be small enough to be inconsequential to
| individuals but costly for high-volume spam.
| gsich wrote:
| Sounds like Hashcash. Could work, but not if noboby implements
| it.
| zeptonix wrote:
| Sounds like an idea for a new coin, TBH
| duskwuff wrote:
| This has been proposed many, many times. It's infeasible for a
| multitude of reasons. One of those is that it would allow any
| web service which sends an email to a user-specified address --
| even a single email used to verify an account, which is
| standard practice -- to be abused to bankrupt the service
| operator.
| jszymborski wrote:
| Nothing new under the sun, I guess :P
|
| That's interesting, though. The attack would require the
| collusion of many parties. That's very feasible if you
| consider how easy it is to create email addresses today.
|
| One could imagine the system requires a one-time registration
| fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam penalty. That
| wouldn't be a solution on it's own, but pair that with delays
| in applying penalties and an arbitrage system and I think
| we're looking at an increasingly stable system but with
| ballooning complexity.
|
| Don't know if it's practical, and as you've mentioned I'm
| sure many people have gone down that road, but I'll be
| daydreaming about it for the next little bit :)
| duskwuff wrote:
| > The attack would require the collusion of many parties.
|
| Not sure what parties you have in mind here. As far as I'm
| aware, it would only require the involvement of a single
| party entering a bunch of fake or scraped email addresses
| into a registration form. The malicious party wouldn't
| receive any benefit, but the web site operator would have
| their funds drained.
|
| > One could imagine the system requires a one-time
| registration fee orders of magnitude greater than the spam
| penalty.
|
| Requiring every online service which sends emails to charge
| users to register would be disastrous. It would make entire
| classes of web sites (like hobbyist forums, or even free
| trials of paid services) infeasible to operate.
| rickydroll wrote:
| not necessarily. Even in my prototype sender pays email
| environment (camram/2 penny blue), the cost of the stamp was
| pushed on the message originator i.e. the email client. The
| mail server delivering the mail to another server on the
| Internet doesn't need to take that message if it doesn't have
| postage.
|
| There are a few other ideas the project explored including
| using captive zombie nets generating postage for a company's
| email using spare cycles on desktops. Truth be told, whole
| distributed postage stamp generating model looked a hell of a
| lot like bitcoin mining.
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Didn't Bill Gates think of this in his 90's book The Road Ahead?
| Pay to gain attention, but the receiver can refuse to charge you
| if s/he found your mail worthy of their attention. (E.g. if
| you're trying to gain the attention of a lost relative and put a
| $200 reward so they'd notice your email).
|
| Of course there's no cryptocurrency hungry rent-seeker in his
| concept.
| DennisP wrote:
| Cryptocurrency could be a convenient way to do the
| micropayments, without any rent-seeking if the project doesn't
| mint its own token. They'd need to solve scaling first though.
| BeetleB wrote:
| If he bumps people off his mailing list whenever he's getting
| this email, isn't it working as intended? The recipient didn't
| whitelist you, which means he/she doesn't really want your email.
|
| I implemented this for my personal email some years ago, although
| I did put a third "grey" list for people I didn't want such
| emails to go to (but were still not on whitelist) - mostly
| because I didn't want to annoy the sender (a non-profit, etc).
|
| A _lot_ of my non-tech friends have asked if I can start up a
| service to offer this to anyone and they claimed they were
| willing to pay. I never bothered, as such services already exist.
| The point, though, is that a lot of people do want this.
| neltnerb wrote:
| Yeah... I'm not sure I see an alternative to this being what
| most people do, unless spam filters somehow win an arms race
| when it's an uphill battle.
|
| But, assuming this replaced AI spam filters rather than being
| used together, is it any worse than your friend's (or your
| mailing list member's) email getting classified as spam? At
| least this way you know they didn't receive it and if you
| really did care about them specifically you have recourse.
|
| If it was just silently classified as spam you don't even know
| they didn't get it until weeks or months later if they ever
| notice it in the first place.
| asldihgiyug wrote:
| The author has nothing of substance to contribute. This could
| have been a tweet but they wrote an article repeating the same
| thing over and over to get a click on their site. These are
| exactly the kind of misleading advertising that I want to get rid
| of and a paid email service (never heard of it before this) seems
| to do that based on the author's reaction.
| Kiro wrote:
| This certainly needs a (2018) since Earn was bought by Coinbase
| and doesn't even have this feature anymore.
|
| Edit: (2018) has now been added.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| so evidently they failed and email was saved?
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| This causes yet another rich v poor divide. Poor people may not
| even be able to pay a few pennies to send an email (perhaps at a
| downturn when they need to reach out). Hopefully they have a
| phone, but at least the library might have free computer use for
| your currently free email.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| Why the downvotes? Just curious.
| mediocregopher wrote:
| 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.
| pharmakom wrote:
| Isn't Earn just a zombie start-up with some over invested VCs at
| this point? What traction can they demonstrate after years of
| work and millions in funding?
| Kiro wrote:
| Earn doesn't exist anymore. They were bought by Coinbase and is
| now Coinbase Earn which has nothing to do with emails.
|
| This article is from 2018.
| yupper32 wrote:
| Being subscribed to a newsletter for a year does not correlate
| with me actually wanting to receive that newsletter anymore.
|
| Every once in a while I go through my emails an unsubscribe from
| all the junk. Junk I've been receiving for months (or more, if
| I've been lazy) without actually wanting to read or receive them.
|
| With that perspective, this sounds like someone who doesn't
| realize that not everyone wants to continue receiving their
| newsletter, even if they've technically been subscribed for a
| year. Instead of unsubscribing from dozens of services every 6
| months, including this newsletter, they set up an allowlist.
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| If an email bounces back to you, just remove the address!
|
| I don't see a problem here, except maybe you're adding addresses
| that either didnt sign up or forgot that they signed up.
| kyeb wrote:
| The interesting part about this idea to me is the scalability.
|
| If you're someone looking to cold-email someone you admire,
| you're willing to spend a dollar to do that.
|
| If you're a spammer who plays number games with your emails
| (maybe 0.01% result in a successful clickthrough), $1 per email
| is not even close to worth it.
|
| I haven't thought through all the consequences yet, but this
| seems like a super interesting idea to me, with the potential to
| kill off the low-probability-of-success emails that I get
| hundreds of per day!
| [deleted]
| andrewzah wrote:
| Nothing is going to kill email.
| beebmam wrote:
| The sooner people realize this, the better off we'll all be.
| When companies use slack or other chat-like tools, instead of
| email, total organizational disaster inevitably ensues.
| munk-a wrote:
| Email and instant messaging aren't in competition they
| fulfill different communication roles and while each can be
| used as the other (there isn't a deep fundamental difference)
| each is habitually used in a very different manner.
| Asynchronous notifications about large tasks shouldn't be
| done in a medium where that notification is possibly going to
| scroll off of a screen in a few hours[1] (maybe I'm busy and
| want to review that long document sometime next week) - while
| low friction direct communication becomes sloggy through
| emails - nobody I've ever met would ever email AFK before
| going off to lunch. And, specifically, I wouldn't want them
| to mass-email the whole company with ever status change -
| being able to see availability at a glance makes
| communication smoother.
|
| Companies should use both.
|
| 1. Message reminders in most clients _can_ sorta do this but
| I still prefer emails.
| shortformblog wrote:
| As the person who wrote this rant I wish I had toned it back a
| bit. This is usually not my style. That is all.
| wilburTheDog wrote:
| So do you no longer have the same take on it? How would you
| feel today about an email whitelist with a pay-to-bypass
| option?
| pontus wrote:
| Seems like the incentive is opposite of what I would want. It
| says that you only pay if you get a response. Doesn't that mean
| that you should just spam as many people as possible since it's
| free unless you get a lead?
| DennisP wrote:
| In fact, the opposite seems like a better plan. You only pay if
| you waste my time, and if I respond then I'm saying you didn't.
| ipsum2 wrote:
| How is that different from what we have now?
| BayAreaEscapee wrote:
| Certainly, one of the problems with email is that it is free for
| the sender. If sending an email required even a small amount of
| "postage", even a thousandth of a cent, it would solve a lot of
| problems. (Perhaps, the receiver would get the bulk of this
| "postage", with the service provider creating the infrastructure
| getting a commission.)
|
| The problem with it is that there is no easy way for anyone who
| is willing to pay a thousandth of a cent to send an email to
| someone to pay it. Despite how much the internet has boomed in
| the last thirty years, there is still no good way for individual
| consumers to send and receive micropayments worldwide.
| admax88qqq wrote:
| Postage has done nothing to stop the tremendous amount of spam
| flyers I receive every week.
| rickydroll wrote:
| back in the mid to thousands. I had a working example of a
| sender pays email environment. it used hash cash embedded in an
| email message in combination with content filtering.
|
| it was more of a proof of concept that an actual practical
| system but if I was going to do it again today I would instead
| put the postage at the SMTP level as a protocol extension where
| your reputation from the mail service perspective would tell
| you how big a Hash cash stamp to create. This model would
| accommodate inflation and familiarity for generating bigger and
| smaller stamps.
|
| It's an interesting project for anyone that has the time.
| teddyh wrote:
| I see it's time to link this thing again, which made the rounds
| in the late 1990s as spam was starting to become a problem.
| Everybody and their dog had their own "ultimate solution" to the
| spam problem, which they all thought was obviously the correct
| one, but all of them were more or less equally unworkable:
|
| https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
| deeblering4 wrote:
| Spoiler -- it won't.
| jlawer wrote:
| I remember plans for email credits / micro transactions back in
| the 90s as a "cure" for spam.
|
| If anything it would be easier to implement today with the
| centralisation of email services around large providers (MS,
| Google, etc).
| [deleted]
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| And when he says 'ruin email', he means 'ruin how _he_ makes
| money using email.
|
| For the rest of us that are tired of having our time wasted, it
| could be quite nice.
| dddnzzz334 wrote:
| > he means 'ruin how he makes money using email
|
| No, it would ruin email in general. You are always in control
| of whether you want to read an email or not.
| erulabs wrote:
| > You are always in control of whether you want to read an
| email or not.
|
| Demonstrably false. You cannot ignore a category of
| information without first without interacting with it - as
| you must first establish that it _is part of that category_.
| It's impossible to know a spam message that got thru
| automated filters is spam or not until I read at least the
| subject line.
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| Nope. The open protocol email was built on would still work,
| just some people would now use a service that blocks
| newsletters and other annoying spam. Only his business model
| would be effected, the rest of could merilly go on without
| consequence of Earn.com's success.
| brutal_chaos_ wrote:
| It might create yet another poor v rich divide. See my comment
| elsewhere for more of an explanation
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