Solution - A service where a person pays a nominal amount, say $2, to land in your inbox. These messages will have 'PRIORITY INBOX' in their subject. This lets you filter the high-effort messages at a glance.

Possible use cases

1. Recruiter spam - This will let you filter the serious from the casual requests at a glance. Messages with 'PRIORITY INBOX' in the subject tell you the recruiter paid to get your attention and likely worth your time.

2. For an influencer - Say you run a blog and review developer tools every week. If you get tons of requests to cover different tools, you could use this service to filter out low-effort requests

3. Mentor-mentee - As mentor you can filter high-effort queries via this service. As the sender pays to reach your inbox, the messages are likely to be more focused so that you respond

This model can apply to other types of unsolicited messages where

a) Sender wants to stand-out from the generic low effort messages

b) Receiver wants to quickly filter high-effort and casual messages

I'd like to get HN's thoughts on

1. If you see value in such a service

2. For what type of messages, filtering quality and low-effort messages is of most value to you? (like developer-recruiter, mentor-mentee)

3. What concerns about this service would keep you from using it? (Assuming privacy and mail deliverability are handled to your satisfaction)

I've started work on this product. If you want to join private beta, signup here - https://airtable.com/shr6ifqw3468JFT0H