Dan Egan charges cold-emailers a $20 deposit that only clears if he replies

Dan Egan, a behavioral-finance expert who spends his time "thinking about how to help people make better decisions about money, time and happiness", was getting a high volume of repetitive requests for research, career guidance and personal investing advice. "Your email inbox is a to-do list that anyone can add items to," he wrote in an October 2018 BBC Worklife column; useless messages crowd out the good ones, and he had to read all of them to find the keepers.

His fix, inspired by learning that venture capitalist Marc Andreessen would answer any email for $100: a page on his personal site routes cold contacts through Earn, a service that lets people earn Bitcoin by completing tasks. Senders commit a $20 donation to charities Egan supports; the donation only completes if he responds. If a message is uninteresting — cryptocurrency pitches usually were — he rejects it, nothing is charged, and the sender still gets a fast, clear answer.

"It's not a money generator – but here's the key: think of all the messages I stopped seeing." In two years the policy opened five connections he calls excellent, most of which moved to ordinary email after the first exchange; the deposit is per approach, not per message. Every sender who came through Earn, he says, was happy to pay, and routing the money to charity blunts the arrogance problem.

Make senders post a $20 charity deposit through Earn; it only completes if Egan replies, so junk self-selects out and serious ones get through.

Email is free to send but expensive to read; a deposit makes senders weigh the reader's time before hitting send.

The refund-on-reply condition aligns incentives — Egan only collects by doing his part.

A third-party service (Earn) automates the escrow, so no trust or invoicing is needed.

Sending the money to charity removes the selfish image of charging strangers for attention.

Price the thing that's actually scarce: a refundable deposit turns an open inbox into a self-sorting queue where junk is filtered by answering, not ignoring.

Egan acknowledged the friction: the cryptocurrency step is a barrier (similar service Bitbounce also requires it), and even he feels the "reactionary cringe" when explaining the policy. He argued the model should scale — if advertisers paid readers for each marketing email, poor targeting would get expensive — and suggested people could set per-sender prices, charging family nothing and spam plenty. As of the 2018 column it remained his personal policy: five excellent connections in two years.