Earn.com Will Ruin Email if it Succeeds. It Must Fail.

If you use the service Earn.com to manage your emails, I will unsubscribe you from my newsletter. Sorry, but I do not respect what it represents.

As someone who runs a newsletter, one thing that I think is very important to emphasize is that I don’t add other people to that newsletter; readers add themselves. This is how the model works.

So it’s in this spirit that a message I received a little while ago knocked me off my feet and made me want to blaze into a fire of a million suns:

The message introduced me to a service called Earn.com, which has recently introduced a feature that allows users to “manage their inbox” by requiring that unknown people trying to contact them pay money. Sonya Mann of Inc. (as well as the late, lamented Exolymph newsletter) explains the recent shift by the company, that was previously known as 21.co, which tries to make it possible for people to earn small amounts of money in cryptocurrency form.

The reason I got this is because the service has an “auto-bounce” feature that blocks…