Communication Protocol for a Generative Age
Mail 3.0
In the video below, you can see how people are using LLMs to industrialize personalized outbound emails (trigger warning: anybody with an email).
Josh Wolfe, as always, is quick to see the big picture:
Email was a fine enough communication system for the early Internet but even before LLMs showed up it had been becoming less and less usable. Here are some key problems with it:
Your email provider can arbitrarily cut off your access, causing you serious problems. You have no recourse against Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.
It’s not easy to use your own email domain/server1. Moreover, if you do so, the big email providers are more likely to mark you as spam and cause deliverability issues for you.
Your email provider sorts your emails for you. It might throw the newsletter you love into “Promotions” or even “Spam” and put marketing emails in your main inbox. This will be made 100X worse by the proliferation of LLMs.
Getting your email address lets people message you. When dealing with individuals, it’s not super bad, but once organizations get ahold of it, you’re in trouble. Try donating to ANY political candidate, and your email address will get on dozens of different political lists constantly asking you for money for candidates you don’t care about whatsoever.
Social networks have a double opt-in for messaging mechanism - you can adjust your settings to only receive messages from people you have approved. But that’s not ideal - you want to receive cold emails, just not the spammy ones.
Consider, for example, being an angel investor who invests in synthetic biology startups. You want to receive cold pitches from startups in your area of expertise. But if your email address is public, you will drown in cold pitches from all kinds of startups that you have no interest in: crypto, SaaS, consumer apps, etc. So a lot of people have been playing the game of keeping their email address semi-public (giving out a lot of cards but keeping it off the Internet). That’s a little silly.
So what do we want? We want a communication system where:
You own your address. Nobody can take it away from you.
Your address is public. There’s no need to worry about what happens if it leaks.
You receive all emails from addresses you’ve whitelisted.
You receive only interesting emails from addresses you haven’t whitelisted.
I think this is achievable, but, Oh, Reader, forgive me, we are going to need to use crypto.
Now, I’m hardly the first person to think of crypto-based messaging systems. Here’s some proof that a solution is demanded:
There are even some projects. For example, here’s Ledgermail:
It’s crypto email! Unfortunately, it’s not going to work. It stores all of the emails on the blockchain. That causes problems:
People send a lot of emails. No blockchain that exists today could support the number of transactions per second that wide adoption of email replacement would require.
You have to pay every time you want to send an email. People are not going to like that.
If the encryption used ever breaks, all emails will become public. Yikes!
So what would a good solution look like? Glad you asked!
You register an address on the blockchain much in the same way as you would create a crypto wallet. You can then “point” the address to a server that will handle your emails by signing a crypto transaction. You can host the server yourself if you’re a nerd, you can point it at a server hosted by an organization you trust not to ban you, you can point it at somebody who bundles the best UI with the server, etc. The organization creating this technology will also provide a starting option so you can receive mail straight away. Most people will choose this option because most people don’t like to think about infrastructure.
The blockchain doesn’t store emails but it stores access rights aka whitelists. The blockchain will be full of entries like “John Wick allowed Puppeys.com to email him” or “Kim Kardashian revoked Kanye’s right to email her.”2
Once you’ve added somebody to your whitelist, they can message you in perpetuity until you revoke that right. Your server stores the blockchain blocks relevant to your account, and if it receives a message from somebody who’s not on your whitelist, it discards it.
There is one exception to the above, as we do want to have some cold emails get through. Every person sets a price to send a contact request (with a message) to them. For most people, it might be around $1. For people who really dislike getting spam, it might be $10. For corporate execs, it might be $100. For well-known artists, it might be $1000. For world-class celebrities, it might be $1,000,000, etc etc. So every time you get an unsolicited message, you receive some money. If you accept the contact request, you might optionally refund it (or you might not). And once you add a person to your whitelist, all further messages are free.
This practically kills spam. Now, then and again, some companies might think that it’s worth $1 to send you a message, but it’s probably not many. And if they think that, you might actually want to see that message. And, anyway, you’ll be way less annoyed at an extra message if it comes with some money. And if you still hate getting such messages, you are free to raise your price up to the point where no corporations will find the idea profitable, but refund contact requests from all real people you want to talk to.
Another benefit of the system is that it removes the need for annoying unsubscribe flows that make you log in and whatnot. You can just revoke somebody’s right to email you with one click, and that’s it. The drastic reduction in the number of inbound messages also kills the promotions/spam/etc. folders in your email client that are gimmicky solutions at best.
That’s basically it. You can add LOTS of cool stuff on top of this idea. My favorite little idea is business cards with unique QR codes that contain private keys combined with blockchain records of “First person to provide a private key to this public key can contact me”. That will make business cards actually give people access to message you.
But that’s a digression, the basic concept is:
Ownership of addresses.
Whitelists on the blockchain.
Pay-to-contact-request.
DNS-like system for pointing addresses to compute.
There are some valid questions/criticisms of this system. I address a few below.
Can blockchains even handle the volume?
Let’s do some napkin math. Solana allows 65,000 transactions per second. Let’s say, 10% of the world uses our new Mail 3.03 system. Let’s also say that on average, each person adds/removes one new recipient per day to their whitelist. That means 800,000,000 transactions per day are required. There are 86,400 seconds in a day, so that comes out to 9259 transactions per second. Meaning that Solana should be able to comfortably support Mail 3.0 for 10% of the world. That puts supporting the whole world within reach.
How do the developers of the system make money?
Small cut from contact-request payments. Those are to be paid in stablecoins (USDC right now, CBDCs later when they arrive). No special token is required for the system, as we want an actual thing that works, not a speculative frenzy.
What happens when people lose their keys?
They lose access. Unfortunately, this is the price to pay for independence from large companies. I imagine pretty soon people will learn to leave a sealed copy of their private keys with their lawyer or a bank safety deposit box or something.
Doesn’t this favor the rich?
Sure, as many other things do. You don’t need to solve the wealth inequality problem on EVERY SINGLE LEVEL, you can address it with just redistribution.
This system is only useful if many people already use it. How do we get enough people to start?
I think it’s actually fairly easy compared to many other proposed schemes that rely on network effects. The higher status you are, the more useful this system is for you. For serious businesspeople, it alleviates the problem of a ton of unsolicited mail. For influencers who have more influence than money, it creates an opportunity for additional income. You start with VCs and social media influencers, it propagates from there.
Crypto - ugh
Ugh indeed but I don’t think there is a better solution.
For tech readers it is, but for the vast majority of people it isn’t.
Also, for corporations, “John joined Xoogle” and “Xoogle allows anyone from Yapple to email anyone within Xoogle”.
You have no idea how much I hate this name.
Cool idea, but:
1. Why blockchain? As a tech savvy person you could do this right now with autoresponders and normal whitelists. In the same way, you could just develop a decentralized standard on normal web technology. In your business card qr code example, you'd just be led to a page with a message form where the sender puts their own email which is either whitelisted automatically or there's a payment option included.
2. With or without crypto, the problem remains that, aside from the clever business card idea, you have to whitelist every person you want to be able to email you without paying. And what if you whitelisted a whole company but now someone from that company who you befriended wants to email you from their private account to get coffee or whatever? Or THEIR friend with no company affiliation at all wants to message you for whatever good reason? Solvable but annoying. I think this falls apart once you bring private emails into this. Then again, maybe people will stop using email for private matters at the point where something like this is really necessary.
i found this quite intriguing!