I support the author but let me tell you a counterargument I don’t think he devotes enough to: Spam is a real issue. The amount of spam emails which get sent are absurd and likely orders of magnitude more than non-spam . And spammers do a lot to mimic real emails, including just hacking legitimate addresses and adding them to botnets. Even on gmail, I still get spam sent to my inbox. Fortunately very rarely, but it s…
> And even if it isn’t bad today, spam has the potential to be much worse in the future with transformer networks and hostile state actors.
> Even on gmail, I still get spam sent to my inbox. Fortunately very rarely, but it still happens.
It is as good as it is exactly because of the requirements author finds tedious.
> It may be as simple as registering your official email with some organization sponsored by open-source, and all the big companies can trust that one organization. Then the org has to deal with spam registrations but maybe there won’t be much and it will work out. idk much about self-hosting so this org might already exist.
They do exist but there are a bunch of problems with that. People have varying definitions of spam, getting paid to whitelist someone creates a perverse incentive or not getting paid will quickly overwhelm the organisation.
Things could be better if we could enforce sender authentication (SPF/DKIM). It would assign a direct cost to getting your domain blacklisted. But if nobody is taking away rest of the spammer's domains (or keeps selling them new ones), they'll continue.