Make Senders Pay or Solve CAPTCHA to Reach Your Inbox
Make people pay to get into your inbox
I built Captchainbox to stop AI cold spam from flooding your inbox. Unknown senders must solve a CAPTCHA or pay a small fee to get through, while trusted contacts arrive as usual. This tool scans metadata without reading your messages, archiving unverified emails instead of deleting them. All fees are donated to The Internet Archive and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helping you reclaim your time and attention.
AI cold outreach is nearly free. Make senders work for your time and attention.
- dwedge
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.
- SilverBirch
Isn't this the opposite of what I want? I don't want people willing to pay getting into my inbox. Those are the people who think they can get more from me somehow. Those are exactly the people I want to not be in my inbox.
- michalpleban
These services pop up from time to time. All they share a fatal flaw: accepting money for email delivery turns email from a communication medium into a service. And a service carries a different set of obligations - someone paying to send an email to me expects that they are buying my time spent on reading their email and replying promptly. I am never going to sell my time like that.
- msdz
Hi Felix,
I know the situation here in Germany kinda sucks for non-incorporated founders (or simply any website administrator trying to commercialize anything [0]), but gating imprint/Impressum behind a login wall makes it not legally compliant.
It needs to be easily accessible from anywhere (that’s why most people place it in the footer), without auth or signup; and if you put it behind either Outlook or Gmail logins, you may as well just not include it at all (realistically, who’s gonna complain if you don’t include “made in Germany”).
All the best for your project, though!
[0]: Personally I’ve given up and just include my name and address on the public web in projects now, which I guess is what the federal government wanted to achieve.
- reticulates
As others have said, this is an age old idea that has been tried dozens of times and sometimes with very big financial backing (there was another attempt on HN just a few months ago). My personal view is that this idea is fatally flawed and will never work. That said, every idea sucks until it doesn’t, sometimes it’s all about the idea in the moment, maybe right now is finally the moment for this idea? So don’t be discouraged by all us naysayers, maybe your fresh perspective in this moment could make the difference.