Email Contact Link as a Service?
In place of sharing your email address, what if you you could share a link for instructing people to contact you via email?
The service would have these features:
- senders must complete a simple secure web form
- recipient's email remains private
- recipient get their own url/endpoint/link to the web form which, when submitted, forwards the email to them
- users (recipients) could have an optional profile page, too
Anyone aware of any service with these features?
For example, I have a contact form on my website at https://www.tipalink.com/contact. By passing the profile_id query parameter, the form submits to the email address of the owner of the profile: https://www.tipalink.com/contact?profile_id=UP-13337333-1. Of course, in place of a query param, I would assign complete url endpoints, like I currently have with the profiles on my website: https://www.tipalink.com/derek.
I have all the code ready from Tipalink.com to stand up a membership-based service like this very quickly. Is it worth it? What would you pay for it?
Idea came from this thread: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/its-not-cool-to-make-an-email-list-out-of-indiehackers-users-emails-63f8024b0b?commentId=-M3DI1c_2diHcyzaQwZt
@tonixx has created pretty much exactly what I described, minus the profile pages: https://contact.do/
Where is the value? Why will someone pay to receive email that they can already do for free?
For the same reasons many people do not list an email address publicly. To keep an email address private. To reduce unwanted emails from other (real) people, which incoming spam filters don't catch. To reduce spam at the source (not everyone uses a mail service provider with equally good spam filtering). To protect your online accounts that use that email address for login (guessing a password is easier than guess a username AND a pw).
I think it's more of a nice to have than something I'd pay enough money each month to make it worth your while (maybe ~$2/month).
I already get a tonne of spam which is a much bigger problem.
yeah, if someone has your email, there's nothing stopping them from spamming you other than your incoming spam filter. with a contact form, like https://contact.do/, you hide your email so they don't know where to send it and you make it harder for them because they have to bypass the spam filters on the form. thanks for your responses and feedback!