Let me get these out of the way fast because these are absolutely the WORST thing to EVER hit the Internet and for some reason they just don’t want to go away and die. Maybe it's because of the ease of doing these things and the insane amounts of money that they claim you can make from them.
A paid to read email company works like this:
You register with the company
Each day they send you a number of emails to read. Actually they are ads that you can either read from your own email account or from their web site.
For each email you read (link you click) you get paid.
And therein lies the rub.
The sites that claim they pay these insane amounts of money per email read (I’ve seen amounts as high as $500 per email) simply DON’T PAY. You can request payment all you like. Hair will grow on door knobs before you EVER see a DIME. Eventually when the company gets enough complaints filed against them with the BBBOnline they close up their doors and you’re out whatever money you paid to join and all the money you thought you were getting.
The sites that DO pay are just not worth joining. Why? Because the amounts they pay per email read are so minuscule that it will take you forever before you see an amount of money that even resembles an income. For example, one site, which is actually a legit site that pays, requires you to read 100 emails to earn 1 penny. That's right, 1 penny. So, in order to earn $1, you have to read 10,000 emails. The site usually gives you about 20 emails to read daily. That means it would take 500 days to make $1.
So, how do you make money with this company? By selling paid memberships to people. The paid memberships probably enable them to give a higher payout rate, which they can now afford since you're paying for membership. But the only way you actually make any real money, is to refer others. So in essence, paid to read email sites turn out to be nothing more than glorified pyramid schemes. But because they offer pay for work, they get away with this.
This scheme isn't quite as popular as it was years ago, though a good number of these sites still exist. Some sites are moving away from the paid to read email slant and moving towards the “get paid to take offers” slant. Basically, the way this works, is you take an offer, like a free trial of some service and they pay you a few dollars to take that offer.
The problem with these programs is that you have to keep track of your offers because they automatically turn into offers that charge you after a certain period of time. So you have to cancel them before this happens. Some of them make it very difficult to do this. That's why it's best to stay away from these paid to programs.
Conclusion: You won't make money online with paid to read emails.