Spam, spam, go away. Only come back if the spammer pays.

The problem of spam has plagued us since the dawn of inbox time. In 2004, Bill Gates predicted that Microsoft would solve the problem in the next two years. That certainly hasn’t happened. Despite built-in email filters and deluxe email management tools, inboxes are still chaotic. Enter Gated, a new email tool tackling spam with mandatory donations.

Gated lets users set up a paid email gate to deter spammers. The goal is to disincentivize the sending of irrelevant or even harmful emails, and make email interactions more meaningful.

• How it works: An email from an unknown sender will trigger an automatic reply prompting the sender to donate a specified amount of money to the user’s nonprofit of choice. 70% of the donation goes to the nonprofit, 15% covers processing fees and the rest goes to Gated.
• If senders decline to donate, the email will go into a separate “gated” folder rather than the primary inbox. Senders can click a button to automatically bypass the donation in case they are a personal connection.
• Gated is just compatible with Gmail for now, but is working on securing Outlook. CEO Andy Mowat said he intends to keep Gated free for users forever. “This is driven by our belief that users shouldn’t be required to pay to clean up the trash dumped by others,” he said.

It’s become popular rather quickly. Last month, Gated officially launched on Product Hunt, hitting product of the day on June 17.

• Charles Hudson, investor in Gated through Precursor Ventures, was worried that using Gated would make him seem closed-off or inaccessible. But those fears have been moot, he said: “Gated allows me to spend more time on the content that I’m getting that I think is relevant to me.”
• Davis Bell, CEO of practice management software company Canopy, signed up for Gated because he hated being inundated with sales and vendor emails. He said the tool has saved him valuable time and energy.

Paying a fee for email access is controversial. Just think about the semi-regular Calendly tech Twitter debates. We’re accustomed to the idea that everyone and everything on the internet is within reach, for free.

• Richard John, a postal system historian at Columbia University, said it could be hard to convince the majority of people to accept this limit on digital access. “If you make spam expensive, you could cut down on it, but that undermines that principle of access, which is an enlightenment principle we’ve had for a long time,” John said.
• Productivity expert Karla Starr doesn’t think paying for direct email access is bad, especially because there are other ways to reach people. She does see it as more of a status signal than a productivity tool, however. You could use a service like this and still end up drowning in emails, she pointed out.
• Angel investor Esther Dyson is a strong proponent of paying for primary inbox email access. She thinks it’s the best solution for the spam problem. She’s not a fan of putting a nonprofit in the middle of the transaction, however. “Being paid for the value of your time is honorable and doesn’t need to be sanitized by giving the money to a charity,” Dyson told me.

Gated’s mainstream success hinges on a major behavioral shift in how we think about email. Melissa Moody, who helped Mowat found Gated, acknowledged this but argued that some of tech’s biggest innovators think in this way. Getting in a stranger’s car via Uber or sleeping on a stranger’s couch via Airbnb seemed weird once, too. Maybe paying to spam is the next big thing.

Read the full story.