Curious Email Service: Boxbe Charges People to Email You

After the hubbub over 10 Minute Mail, I received a number of messages from companies offering similar or complementary services. By far the most interesting and unique is Boxbe.com, and you'll have to exercise a little patience while I explain what it does.

Here's Boxbe in a nutshell: You sign up with a real email address and set up an email account with Boxbe. Don't worry: You don't have to physically check this account; Boxbe forwards all email to you at the account you configure during setup.

Now here's the catch: Boxbe only forwards messages if the sender pays a specified amount of money (in the case of a business) or proves that it's a real person and not a spam machine (in the case of an individual sender). The "test" is a short CAPTCHA "enter the letters you see" test, or humans can choose to pay the fee instead if they'd prefer. The fee is generally less than a quarter, but it can be whatever you'd like. Of course, you can set up as many email addresses as you'd like, which can send you messages free of charge.

Why would you want to do something as insane as charging people to email you? 1) To avoid spam. And 2) To make money. Rather than post a public email address on a web page, for example, you can post the boxbe.com account, which should deter a good chunk of spammers from attempting to email you. Those that do will have to pay to get the message through, and I figure it's worth 10 cents of your time to click the Delete button once. The bigger question for me is whether any sender will actually pay the fee or if the Boxbe mailbox will instead go totally unused.

To answer that question, I set up a boxbe.com account of my own. If you're interested, give it a whirl and see what it looks like from a sender's perspective (don't worry, you won't actually be charged by simply sending the message; you have to complete a payment form online after you get a bounceback from Boxbe if you want it to go all the way through). Go ahead and email me at null@boxbe.com. I let Boxbe set the price of an email dynamically (it should be about 15 cents but that could change), and all proceeds from anyone who actually pays to get their message through to me will go to the American Cancer Society. (Another nice, optional feature that Boxbe offers: Multiple charities you can send any collected fees to.) Of course, you could also complete the CAPTCHA to get the mail through as well.

Is this too crazy to actually work? I'm not sure, but I'm very curious to see how many people actually pay to send an email over the next few weeks. What do you think?