Rethinking Email Filtering

Here’s another one of the revolutionary aspects of ningo.me for you:

Putting a price tag on your email address will turn the tables on email filtering. The recipient can profit from the sender’s knowledge, and the sender can influence the recipient’s filter.

When people first hear or read about ningo.me, they often immediately (or only) recognize the recipient’s benefit of earning money. Some also see the effect of getting less emails (for good or bad).

Yet no-one seems to immediately realize the impact on information distribution. The sender invests hard currency to influence the delivery of the message. This gives the recipient a reliable indicator of how important the message and the recipient are to the sender.

In normal email (or any electronic communications channels), there is no friction to sending a message. If A has a message and the handle or address of B, A can send the message to B for free. Therefore, there is no direct motivation for A to consider whether B should be sent the message or not.

This in turn imposes the entire burden of filtering the message to the recipient B. It is B’s job to either manually read all incoming messages and rate their relevance, or to find, configure, and maintain automatic filtering tools. The latter always bears the risk of filtering mistakes.

With ningo.me, the burden of email filtering is much better distributed among the two participants of the conversation. Because A has to pay to get the message delivered to B, A will think harder whether it is worthwhile to send the message. A will most probably make its content more relevant to B, too. When B receives a message through a paid-for ningo.me address, B immediately knows A deemed it valuable to send the message and can handle it with a higher priority than the “free” messages.

 

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