The problem:

low power/toughness, long blond hair entice attackers

You're a sexy enchantress. You have many admirers. Some are your closest friends, some would pay for your attention, and others would presume to make a whore of your inbox.



I get a lot of email.

1. At work I get a lot of email that is targeted spam—sales people reaching out to me, often with personalized messages. They can be relentless, and they have set up automation software to help them be relentlessness.

2. On my personal account, I get a lot of real email that is actually meant for other people. My username is generic enough that it surely exists on every email service. I’ve had lawyers send me others’ tax returns for chrissakes.

3. On both accounts, I get a lot of untargeted spam and unwanted notifications for services I never signed up for.

Existing efforts fall short.

Gmail’s new inbox categories are a great help with #3 but they don’t help with #1 and #2.

The Mark as Spam/Unsubscribe feature in Gmail doesn’t seem to stop unwanted senders from reaching my inbox.

HashCash implementations, like Penny Post, are not widely adopted and do not allow the recipient to receive or refund the value spent by the sender.

Other services that would filter your mail for you require access to your mail account or require that your mail be forwarded to them, which obviously means that you can't use them for anything private, like your email.

The solution:

It's like Elephant Grass for email

Elephant Grass for Gmail – Free, Open Source, Bitcoin-Powered Spam Control.

redirect to GitHub: http://elephantgrass.io



Here’s what it does:

Contacts are whitelisted and come through clear, without requirement to pay.

Those not whitelisted are filtered from your inbox and receive an auto response with a bitcoin address and request for payment in order to have their email appear in your inbox. If payment is received the messages is moved back to your inbox.

Those who do not pay are blacklisted and will never appear in your Inbox nor be responded to again.

No external services and no third parties have access to your data. Everything is contained within your Google account.

What you’ll need:

A Gmail account or Google hosted email for your domain.

A bitcoin address.

The critism: I don’t use Gmail.

The answer: We're looking forward to your port to Thunderbird, Mail.app and Outlook.

For more thorough instructions, check the Read.me on the GitHub repo.

Step 1 - click the link to copy the spreadsheet to your account

Step 2 - confirm

Step 3 - fill in your bitcoin address

Step 4 - run the script

Step 5 - authorize

Step 6 - accept the the permissions

Step 7 - success!

Step 8 - get rich







Elephant Grass is a collaboration by Timbo White & Jesse Powell