Email idea

I have deleted every unwanted subscription and yet I still have thousands of spam emails a month.

I scan through the subject headings all of my spam because occasionally a real email gets trapped in there.

Here’s what I want …

Everyone that sends me an email for the first time goes through this process.

The first email gets held in escrow.

The sender gets a return email with a link they have to click through to.

On that link they need to prove that they are human by doing a Captcha  (or similar) after which their first email is released from escrow.

Thereafter they are on the whitelist and their emails come through all the time.

For the computer generated emails these are filtered as usual, as spam or subscriptions.

A subscription usually has some means to unsubscribe and gets held in a greylist.

I chose which subscriptions to let through from the greylist into my inbox.

And I can remove people from the whitelist at any time if I feel the urge.

This business could be managed by a meta-email app for a smartphone (with browser access as well) that links to any current email service.

The business model?

Not advertising – I hate that in email apps. Analytics? Well that doesn’t seem right if you breach privacy and that is hard not to do.

Maybe a premium service that manages the whitelist and provides the users reports on their email usage.

Also an encrypted service with no central record keeping to keep those that care out of the government metadata databases. But that would require using a special email service not the usual providers.

Personally I like the idea of using Captcha to interpret all of the old births, deaths and marriages docs. There’s a fortune to be made in automated genealogy.