felixdoerp

I think this is a pretty big moment. If this holds (cautious since this company also has a vested interest) it could mean that we see similar dynamics that we saw in LLM / GPT stuff

I am glad to hear! :)

for new sign ups that would indeed make it difficult. The tool checks what senders have sent you transactional looking emails and puts them on a whitelist.

if you sign up to a new service you would have to look into your archive for the sign up email.

you can pay what you want for the service, including 0 dollars for a lifetime access :)

that is what I was thinking

I basically saw a lot of people complaining about it on LinkedIn and Reddit - spam filters seem to be struggling. And I also just thought this would be an interesting idea to play around with.

pretty much this. The idea is that putting work / resources behind the sent message translates into more relevant messages getting into the owner's inbox.

super interesting - did not know!

100%! AFAIK apple is working on a pre-screening for unknown callers for the same reason. And it would be interesting to explore if pay to call / captcha to call would be feasible :)

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?

good point! will adjust :)

valid point and for personal inboxes I would also not think this makes a lot of sense. Yet, for many businesses or people in these businesses, the amount of inbound is just not manageable at this point.

this could also be an option, yes!

also very valid. Currently updating this to a pay-what-you-want lifetime purchase, where 0 is also a valid price?

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?

Hi HN :) really excited to share this with you.

The one thing AI reliably does is generate noise. Half the tools I see launch are just machines for producing more noise across more channels. And people are starting to see this in the form of emails in their inboxes as spam filters are struggling.

There used to be a useful signal in email: the effort a sender put into customizing a message was a rough proxy for how relevant it actually was. AI killed that. Now it's customized slop with the appearance of effort with none of the cost. It is painful that the open internet / open channels have been abused like this.

Captchainbox applies the idea of proof-of-work to email. If a sender is willing to do a bit of work to reach you, the message is more likely to be worth your time and the sender more likely to be real. The work is a traditional captcha. You can also set a pay-to-deliver amount if you want more friction. The proceeds of the delivery payment after transaction costs go to the Internet Archive and the EFF. The tool currently works by authing with your Gmail or Outlook and during launch time I make this completely free as a lifetime deal (with optional payment if you wanna support).

How it works: Captchainbox builds a whitelist automatically from the metadata of your past correspondence. If you've emailed an individual address, that sender can reach you. If you talk to several people at the same domain, we whitelist the whole domain. If one transactional-looking sender has sent you more than 10 emails, we treat it as a transactional domain and let it through. This whitelist is for you to change whenever you want. It continues to build organically as you converse with more addresses.

Incoming mail is checked against that whitelist. Senders already on it land in your inbox as normal. Anyone else gets archived (never deleted) and is sent a challenge. This can be the captcha or the payment link. Once they solve it, their email is pulled out of the archive and put back into your inbox.

if you want to see what this looks like from a sender's point of view, send me an email here: [email protected]

The service only ever reads metadata, never message content. And since nothing is ever deleted, you can't lose a message. There is a legitimate risk / downside: if you sign up to a new service, these emails also land in the archive. Since we do not process the content, a first-time sender who can't solve the challenge (say an automated activation email) will sit in your archive until you spot it.

Happy to answer anything! :)

yeah I think this is for sure the issue that I currently do not have a solution for.

for those emails I would (currently) need to rely on the user to check their archive if they specifically wait for a password reset, for example.

Yeah I feel right now captchas can do a decent job of providing some friction, also captcha providers work on upping their game. the pay-to-deliver is what I see as the ultimate show that this message should be relevant.