New Email Service Tackles Spam With Bitcoin Micropayments

A recently launched service called Composed aims to boost the fight against spam by charging bitcoin micropayments for emails.
Composed users are assigned an email address with a getcomposed.com domain name and can decide how much they wish to charge senders for an email. Anyone wanting their message to arrive at that address will have to respond to an automated reply and pay for the privilege by sending bitcoin or fiat currency via PayPal.
Ryan Gerard, who created the service, said:
“When it costs spammers real money to send email, they will send less of it. Using bitcoin for micropayments in that system is the perfect solution.”
Putting a good idea into practice
The developer, who goes by the Twitter handle ‘@dreadpirateryan‘, said he had come acrossproposals for using bitcoin micropayments to make spam more expensive to send. Composed is his attempt to turn that idea into a working “utility” that also compensates receivers for having to spend time reading email from strangers.
The idea is for Composed users to publish their paywalled email address in places where the general public might see it. Gerard suggests personal websites, blogs and social media profiles as places where users might swap out their personal email address for a Composed one.
“Composed is a utility to compensate you for your time when external parties you don’t know well want to cold-email you,” he said.

This post was published at Coin Desk on February 19, 2015.