Prior to GMail, we used to check our "Junk" folder occasionally in whatever email service we used.
When GMail arrived with its nice spam classification, it was great. Worked well, better than any competitors out there. This gradually conditioned us to ignore the "Spam" directory completely. Now things have moved to the opposite extreme. It is quite difficult to host independent email servers and send emails from it without GMail classifying it as spam. The high false-positive rate has become the norm. Instead of GMail trying to reduce the false-positive rate, it has now become the responsibility of those hosting email servers to jump through the hoops to ensure that their emails are not classified as spam.
Makes one think: If we knew what we know today about spam and abuse of Internet services, would SMTP have been designed the way it is designed today? What fundamental design change could have made it immune to spam? Perhaps a pull-based design instead of push-based? Perhaps something even cleverer?
When GMail arrived with its nice spam classification, it was great. Worked well, better than any competitors out there. This gradually conditioned us to ignore the "Spam" directory completely. Now things have moved to the opposite extreme. It is quite difficult to host independent email servers and send emails from it without GMail classifying it as spam. The high false-positive rate has become the norm. Instead of GMail trying to reduce the false-positive rate, it has now become the responsibility of those hosting email servers to jump through the hoops to ensure that their emails are not classified as spam.
Makes one think: If we knew what we know today about spam and abuse of Internet services, would SMTP have been designed the way it is designed today? What fundamental design change could have made it immune to spam? Perhaps a pull-based design instead of push-based? Perhaps something even cleverer?