If you saw my inbox on any given day of the week, chances are it would give most sane people a heart attack.  I’m at constant war with those who would automatically subscribe me to their marketing list or the PR distribution list (do I really need to be set up on alert when the C-List celebrity from Bolivia you’re representing uploads a new “viral video”?).

Between the Bac’n, legitimate spam, PR requests and actual legitimate emails I want to read, inbox zero is a fantasy for someone like me.

Mike Arrington actually profiled a company that looks like they’d be solving a problem I have today, though – a startup called Attention Auction:

People bid to get you to read their email. You find someone you want to contact, see how many other messages are in their inbox and how they are priced, and then bid for your message to get in the line. If your message isn’t read you can increase the price and push it higher in the queue. As a recipient you’ll see messages sorted from the highest price to the lowest. Open the message and get paid.

Stuff like this can turn opening your inbox from a nightmare into a way to pay for the morning Starbucks.

Yes, this type of thing has been tried before, most famously by AllAdvantage in 1999, which paid users to view ads online. Ether lets people charge for phone calls, but hasn’t really gotten much traction.

This is going to be hard to implement in practice unless it somehow becomes a Chrome plugin that works in conjunction with GMail, or some other sort of plug-in based architecture for web based email.

Still, I like the idea, and hope it evolves to something I can use regularly.