Much of the time I use @Ecency as the general purpose front-end for accessing Hive, and on occasion I use the gift feature to send Ecency Points to people I would like to upvote only I was too late to the post. Unrelated to that, every now and then I want to send a message to someone only I don't know of a feature or dApp that I can use on Hive. Then one day, it occurred to me that I could use Ecency's gift feature as a primitive way to send messages to someone. So I am experimenting with "PoorMan's E-Mail" using Ecency Points.
A Note about Using Ecency Gift Points
When sending Ecency Gift Points to someone, there is a memo field which normally gets populated with the permalink of the post in question. However, it's possible to send Ecency Gift Points directly from the Points page (near the Wallet page). If this is done, the memo field is totally blank.
"Poor Man's E-Mail"
Just as we get notified of any activity in response to our own, we would be notified in the same way when we receive these Ecency Gift Points. As with any other activity we do here, the transaction gets recorded on the blockchain.
For that reason, the messages have to be harmless and free of sensitive personal information . Anything on the Internet is forever (so I've heard), and that goes double for blockchain.
My Initial Testing
I tried sending a test message to myself, but only the blockchain recorded the message; I wasn't notified of it. Also, some value greater than 0.000 has to be entered as the value of the gift being sent; after all, who wants to get a gift of nothing?
I Need Help
Not everyone here uses Ecency, and that's OK. If we're not using our community's front-end or tribal front-end, then we're most likely using one of Hive.Blog, PeakD, or Ecency.
What I need is a fellow Hiver to receive a couple of test messages from me so I can determine if this idea makes sense or is too limited. If I can see that we can exchange messages (and bounce Ecency Gift Points back and forth between us) using Ecency, my next test will be if the messages can be sent between an Ecency user and a non-Ecency user.
If I can prove that the gifting feature can work regardless of front-end (Hive.Blog, PeakD, and Ecency), then perhaps this can serve as a "poor man's e-mail system."
For Interested Volunteers
For anyone interested in helping me with this experiment, just reply to this post and say you're interested. After that, be on the lookout for notifications.
If you're curious about how the messages get recorded, just use Hive Blocks to see how your account recorded it.
I will do this experiment for anyone who replies to this post to express interest, so all participans in this experiment can see how it goes.
Thanks for taking time to read this request for help.