Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get rich by just reading e-mails? Perhaps your attention is in such high demand, some might be willing to pay $1,000 for your response. What about the Queen, you think $10,000 is fair?

Well, Tim Draper apparently wants just $10. Although he doesn’t quite have to answer you. In which case you’ll get a refund. But, even a billionaire might be tempted by a tenner. If not, he might be tempted by Credo’s aim to deal with pesky spam.

Because, presumably, for some people it is far too hard to just click that button and delete them all. Instead, they seemingly think it is easier to have a new button “unpaid emails,” plus paid emails. In addition, they might also like a spam/junk folder too in case some unpaid email was wrongly bounced.

This increases efficiency because now they can first look at the unpaid e-mails, which are probably from individuals they care about, then the paid emails, which are probably from promoters, then they can click the button and delete all the spam e-mails, unless they like having annoying numbers on the left side of the screen, in which case they can just leave them there.

Because there may be some instances the spam mail makes it to the inbox they care about, in which case, the two seconds it would take to deal with it apparently cost the economy some $20 billion according to Credo.

We assume that sum counts individuals who have been scammed through such spam, which we assume would also be individuals who no one would pay even a cent for a response.

But maybe there is a problem here somewhere because BitBounce – which is the underlying system while Credo is the token because two names are better than one – says they have 7,832 active users and are processing 42,000 emails per day.

The start-up says in their prospectus that alongside the incentivized response, they also have a spam filter use case, which is very simple.

Your first manually whitelist contacts, or if you do really want to save some hours hopefully sync them. Then, emails received from non-whitelisted address are automatically sent an auto-responder e-mail asking them to pay you or they will be sent to the unpaid folder.

This way, time is saved, especially if that auto-responder email becomes a common occurrence and you have to click one by one then delete them all. But, if you ignore them and don’t respond to the auto-responder, then the email is eventually sent to the unpaid folder anyway.

That’s the folder where the emails of the whitelisted contacts are sent too. So he’ll probably check it out. Which probably means few will pay. But that’s ok because you can send a Token of Respect™ to “honor your recipient’s time.”

That TM wasn’t added by us, but compared to the quote that follows it, we find it excusable. What we can’t quite let go is how exactly does BitBounce make any money in all of this.

Their prospectus doesn’t have any current revenue and profits data Nor does it even say how they plan to generate it, unless we’ve missed it. But, presumably, they’ll take it off Draper’s tenner.

However, after all this criticism, which perhaps you might have missed under the satire, we do have one good thing to say.

They do seem to know their emails as the press release contained a nice two options button, with them quickly knowing which was clicked and so following up. That capability is something that would be very useful to many professionals, especially marketeers, who would probably be happy to pay for it.

So maybe that’s what Draper is seeing, who has already bought 10% of the tokens, or maybe he’d really like to receive a tenner for your email.

For the privilege of the latter, Credo wants up to $20 million of your money. That’s for just 40% of the tokens, but what you’d receive in return remains a bit of a mystery.