In this article
You can put a price on being messaged. Set a fee in Stars and anybody who is not already a contact has to pay it before their first message reaches you; the Stars land in your balance.
It is the only anti-spam setting that costs the sender something, and that is both why it works and what makes it a bigger decision than a toggle.
What you will be able to do
- check_circle Say exactly who a fee blocks and who it does not.
- check_circle Choose an amount for a reason.
- check_circle Weigh it against the free alternatives.
- check_circle Decide whether it suits you at all.
The fee is set once and applies only to people who are not already in your contacts.
shield Why a price works where a filter does not
Unsolicited messages arrive in volume because sending them is free. A filter has to guess which ones are unwanted and will always be wrong in both directions; a fee does not guess at all. It makes the economics of sending ten thousand messages impossible while leaving one message perfectly affordable.
The people it does not touch are the ones who matter most. Contacts pay nothing, and neither does anybody you messaged first — so the conversations you already have, and any you choose to start, continue exactly as before. The gate only stands in front of strangers who approached you.
What it costs is everybody in the middle: the reader with a genuine question, the person who found you through your work, the one who wanted to tell you something and has no way of knowing whether it was worth a payment. They are not spam, and they are the reason this setting is not simply free protection.
Four ways to keep strangers out of an inbox
They differ in who gets stopped and what it costs to be one of them.
| Who it stops | What it costs a genuine stranger | Where it falls short | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charging Stars | Everybody sending in bulk, completely | A real payment, and the awkwardness of deciding whether you are worth it. | It stops the polite too. The people who will not pay include most of the ones you would have been glad to hear from. |
| Only contacts can message | Everybody who is not already in your contacts | No route at all. There is nothing they can do except find you elsewhere. | Blunt. It also removes the good approaches, and it makes a public username close to pointless. |
| Archiving new chats automatically | Nobody — it sorts rather than refuses | Nothing. Their message arrives; it simply does not interrupt you. | You still have to look through the archive occasionally, or you will miss the courier and the new colleague along with the spam. |
| Doing nothing and blocking | One account at a time, after the fact | Nothing, which is the point. | It scales badly. If you are receiving dozens a day, blocking is a part-time job rather than a setting. |
A fee is the strongest option and the least forgiving. Try the sorting one first unless the volume has already made that impossible.
sell Choosing an amount, and what it says
The number is doing two jobs and they pull apart. A small fee is enough to destroy bulk sending, because a spammer's economics collapse at any price above zero. A large one is a filter for seriousness, which is a different intention and reads differently to the person on the other side.
A low amount says "prove you are a person". A high one says "my attention is for sale", and whether that is reasonable depends entirely on what you do — unremarkable for a consultant, off-putting from somebody who runs a community and asks people to get in touch.
There is one more thing worth being honest about. Once an inbox produces income, the incentive to keep it open and expensive is real, and the setting stops being purely about spam. That is not a reason to avoid it; it is a reason to pick the number before thinking about the revenue rather than afterwards.
settings Setting it up
- Check the volume first Automatic archiving may be enough.
- Turn it on in the privacy settings It needs the subscription.
- Pick the amount before thinking about income Small stops spam entirely.
- Remember contacts are unaffected And anybody you write to first.
- Name a free route in your bio Or the answer is simply no.
- Review it after a month Both the inbox and what it earned.
This page stops unwanted messages by charging for them. The curriculum step is the other approach: what an automatic filter can recognise, what it gets wrong in both directions, and why the two methods fail in opposite ways.
At a glance
- 1Charge for messages
Premium users can charge Stars for messages from strangers.
- 2Contacts are free
People you know or contacted first are exempt.
- 3Leave a free route
Say in your bio how people can reach you without paying.
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