Why waste your time with one or two gigabytes of free email when you can get paid to take three? That’s right. A three gigabyte account that pays.

Cashette is essentially a challenge/response system, where non-whitelisted senders are charged if you read their mail. You get a web-based, spam-controlled POP3 email account with 3000 MB of storage. It works with your favorite email client, like Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird and The Bat. Interfaces with other POP3 services, including AOL, Hotmail, Juno, Mail.com, MSN, Netzero, Yahoo, and Yahoo Mail Plus, so you can access your multiple email accounts at one place.

Cashette claims you’ll see no banner ads, pop-up ads or contextual ads. But no mention is made of the non-contextual ads at the sidebar, or the taglines tacked onto outbound messages, like: “Stops spam 100% for your email accounts or you get paid. http://www.cashette.com”

How does it work? You set a price you’re willing to be paid to read spam… Cashette suggests one to five cents. You get paid for spam you get from senders who aren’t on your whitelist. Only spammers… er, advertisers… who sign up for Cashette accounts and pre-pay can pound spam down your Inbox.

Surprisingly, Cashette even lets you limit the number of pre-paid spammers you’re willing to tolerate. Cashette’s default is set to ten per day. We set our test account’s spam limit to zero. You can also limit pre-paid spam to several categories of your choice.

Non-Cashette senders must respond to an auto-reply message before their mail is passed on to you. You can view the blocked messages in the Blocked folders.

Cashette wants you to suck your existing address books into your Cashette whitelist. Think long and hard. If the service ever gets sold, your contacts may go with it.

While Network Computing gushes, “Cashette is the priceline.com of SPAM and free e-mail,” Sun Tsu observes at net-abuse:

Their website is well worth the read. It’s only about 4 pages and reads like a fiction novel written as a graduate thesis project by a very clueless IT student who most likely aced the project, being fortunate enough to have equally clueless governing professors.The hypothesis of making money from reading spam is as clueless as believing that one can make money from allowing Atricks to spam from one’s willingly “controlled” boxen. [Yes, he said “boxen”. It’s not our typo. -Ed]

Other managers are similarly unimpressed. Sync2Play labels Cashette Spam Control Thru Extortion:

One of the subscribers to my free newsletter is using a service called Cashette for spam control. This service appears to require me to sign up in order to get my mail delivered to the individual. Like many of the challenge/response systems, it requires you to click a link in an email message. When you get to what should be a challenge/response phrase, Cashette asks for a username and password.I don’t have a Cashette account, so I click the link that says “Why should I signup?” The response:

“1) Cashette will cover your cost up to $0.25 to send email to clueless@mydomain.com.”

“To stop spam, clueless@mydomain.com is charging a small fee to those who are not yet on his/her Approved List. The payment is automatically refunded when he/she replies to you or adds you to the Cashette address book or Approved List.”

“2) You can stop spam for your existing email addresses. Learn more.”

“3) You get a free email account with 10MB of storage space. Learn more.”

So if I want to deliver the message to this subscriber, I either pay $0.25 or signup for Cashette. Guess he doesn’t need the newsletter.

Eli Barzilay fumes at Brown University:

Several people have told me recently that they have received annoying emails from some cashette.com account. If anyone receives similar emails in the future, please let me know and I will disable emails to these accounts.FYI, this is a service that provides whitelist-like functionality, and they simply choose to identify mailing lists according to some non-standard headers that mailman does not use (in fact, I didn’t see a single mailing list manager except for Yahoo that does it). The annoying thing is that trying to contact this person directly gave me the same message back. The extremely annoying thing is that to make my message get to that person, I am expected to open a cashette account! The absolutely very extremely super highly annoying thing is that I’ve spent good time discussing this with the service support people there and we are getting absolutely nowhere. If anyone ever encounters any problems with this service, or possibly similar ones, my suggestion is to not even try to contact them back. It’s funny that the best way to deal with this is to treat it like spam.

DX-News admin Steve-KF2TI rants:

I am getting tired of receiving these messages and plan on deleting the person responsible for them.If someone does not want DX-NEWS messages, then unsubcribe, but please DO NOT put the reflector on one of these lists..it’s very inconsiderate of everyone behind the scenes that has to deal with them..namely ME.

I have already “let go” 5 other subscribers for similar practices as well as 2 who selectively blocked messages from other subscribers.”

Matt Dralle frustration at KR-List is also hard to miss:

I’ve caught the great Cashette.Com debacle of 2004 and have tried to clean out all of the pending List email queues of all the “you are not yet on my Approved List” messages. There were about 117 of them queued when I noticed what was going on.In a nutshell, this guy signed up for all of the Lists and had a “register with my site” spam filter enabled on his account. When his account started receiving List messages, it started sending back, “you need to register” messages back to the various Lists which in turn went to the Lists which in turn got sent to the same spam filter which in turn sent back a message indicating that the List needed to register, and so on and so on until, I suppose, the Internet just blew up! Sheeze, some of these spam systems are so brain dead!

Dralle sums it up with,”Anyway, I’ve cleaned out all of the messages generated by this thing and put in a permanent block from this cashette.com website so that this shouldn’t be a problem any longer.”

That may be a problem… especially for Cashette subscribers. If you do sign up, make sure you whitelist all your subscriptions.

At this point, we shouldn’t have to warn you.

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