Have these guys already stumbled upon it, but only revealed a small part of their new idea?

What do their investors know that we don’t?

…The real solution is patentable. They are on the right track. Does anyone know if they have filed?

Serio.. they are thinking really out of the box.!

I’m also wondering about this claim to have studied World of Warcraft. Warcraft has no mail prioritization system. All communications in Warcraft are handled by instant messaging with no constraints other than user blocking. The mail system in Warcraft has almost nothing to do with communications. It serves as a medium for conducting trade and moving inventory - like working with Fedex or UPS. Mail is very limited in Warcraft because it’s extremely cumbersome to use - you can only check mail in limited locations and it has delivery time constraints. There’s a small fee but it’s entirely inconsequential to the user. Blizzard never implemented the fee to promote a certain type of user behavior - it’s only there as a “sink” to help prevent in-game economic inflation.

Nice try posting the Final Ultimate Solution to the Spam Problem (FUSSP) questionaire. But this has nothing to do with Spam at all.

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we’ll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don’t care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
(X) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatibility with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don’t want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don’t think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you’re a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I’m going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

- I at one point had 30 referrels and was making $17-20 a day for doing absolutley nothing. Big money for (a fifteen year old) ..

- The point, making a currency for emails doesnt work. Unless you do it for every single email everywhere!, also - it would need to be real money.

Go to video.google.com type in “EngEDU” then look for one about spam. And learn what you didnt know, its amazing - Rb

Everyone else… not so sure. But since all it takes for success are VC and CEO buyins, so I’m pretty sure this company has a bright future.

I think the objective is to change the behavior of the sender, not just the reader of the email. People always hit reply to all or send emails to show ‘how smart they are’ or that ‘they are working hard’. That is what clogs email and a lot of the important messages are lost in the clutter. If this can get people to think before they click send, I’m all for it.

you’re right, this is the next big thing….for me to poop on!

If you want to send an email you have to “bid” a certain amount to get to the top of that person’s email inbox. (You can also see how much it would take to do so)

It might work very well with a bit of tweaking. I wouldn’t write it off just yet, people.

Where do people find the investors to put $6m into something like this, presumably the VCs really don’t care about throwing money away?

TC deadpool here comes another

The only solution to e-mail overload is smarter software and we can accomplish this without user intervention. The same is also true for spam. We can surely develop a more innovative solution than this.

Finally, if these guys can land $6 Million in financing for something like this, then we all need to start lining up for venture and angel funding. All I want is about $50,000, which I’ll easily double or triple in under a year’s time with new deals, subscriptions, etc. Sitting on a cash cow is no good when you cannot afford to market it to a larger audience.

The challenge with information overload is that the sender pays little or no cost for sending the message. The burden is placed on the recipient. New communication media arrive and exacerbate the problem for the recipient.

At our humble little company (funded well south of $6M), we took a postage approach and applied cost to internal email. Like all things, when something is free, we waste it. When something costs, we conserve it.

There is definitely resistance among employees. But the email overload occurs due to the network effect of employee groups. And I believe that the entire network of users within an organization will need to reduce what goes through their email outbox in order for recipients to achieve a reduction in their email inbox.

Bob Hiss
http://www.getbacksoft.com

I’ve worked for a large company… one of the largest..as a developer and never saw the need for it. I had to read almost all my emails from colleages and bosses, so I never felt the need to “concentrate” on anything one of them.

What role did/do you play in the org that you find the need for it?

And as for the “use the priority button” comments, if everything is marked “high priority” then that obviously doesn’t help anyone prioritize.