Boxbe is the service which has come up with this excellent idea of making spammers pay if they want to reach you. It starts with you creating your public email address and then adding all your known contacts including relatives and friends. Anyone else, which is not in the address list will have to pay if s/he wants to reach you be it a spammer, advertiser or any other unknown personality. You set your own price which can be starting from 3 cents going up to $100. You will be getting 75% of collected funds. You can leave this new email address anywhere and whichever email is sent to this address will be forwarded to your Gmail/Yahoo/Live account. So this startup acts as a kind of filter for your emails and you don’t need to disclose your loved email address at all. You can also let Boxbe promote you anonymously to advertisers. Really there is an option for that too!
But then, there is a problem…what about those people with whom you have lost contact for long time and all of sudden, you are sighted somewhere by one of them. He wants to contact you but then, amount needs to be paid for contacting you. Therefore, you need to make a choice. If you have been just testing the new services, specially signing for Web 2.0 startups and also concerned about spam, better go for Boxbe and at other places where you are pretty confident about your email address’s security (like Google, Yahoo or my website 🙂 ), you can leave your primary email address without any worries! Another question arises is that how much this new startup reliable where you will be exposing all the securely kept contacts (in your desktop email service). No comments!! But definitely a great and completely different idea of fighting with the spam. I am impressed.