Long-awaited Spam

No doubt, spam is the most serious problem of the virtual environment. It is known that today over 60% of all emails are spam. And you can rarely meet a person who would not be irritated by spam messages.

Yesterday it was announced that San Francisco Boxbe had raised $1.5 million in venture capital intended to develop the company’s quite peculiar service. The service is designed to change attitude towards spam dramatically by establishing mutually beneficial relationships between Internet users and spammers.

How does it work? In short, a user registers an email account at Boxbe for advertising messages (sounds useful if you want an email account especially for public profiles). At that the basic information about the user is taken into account when choosing what type of messages to send to the account. Besides, you can also choose how many advertising emails you are ready to read daily. This means that the inbox will not be stuffed with unwanted tons of spam – only the spam you want will arrive.

And there is one additional advantage ready for you: a Boxbe user is also able to choose the payment he will get for reading the advertising emails (with a recommended amount varying in the range from 15 to 25 cents per email). And Boxbe gets its share of 25 per cent.

It is also interesting that an account holder will need to specify the email accounts for free delivery. All the messages arriving from other accounts will pass a close check and a sender will either have to pass a small humanity test or pay for delivery of the message.

I still doubt it is possible to earn much money reading spam emails (though I’ll be happy to hear of any examples) but chances are the service will make life a little more difficult for spammers.