To push back against the assault, a 10-month-old, Bay Area-based startup called Gated has emerged with an approach to help both overwhelmed email recipients and hopefully benefit society at large. The big idea: to force unknown senders to donate to a nonprofit chosen by the email recipient in order to get into their inbox. Want to tell strangers about your event next month, pitch your company, sell your gizmo' That's fine, but it's going to cost you ' maybe a lot, depending on who you're trying to reach. Gated ' founded by Andy Mowat, an angel investor who was most recently the VP of growth operations at the employee engagement startup CultureAmp ' works by creating a separate folder in one's Gmail account. According to Mowat, the software automatically builds a list of allowed senders based on who the email holder has communicated with previously; when unknown senders reach out, they're promptly moved into this separate folder, where they're told they can only reach the user's...
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