How to use Gmail to destroy your relationship with your investors and customers

And then you need to enter the username, server, password, etc for the other account, which can even be another GMail account.

What is an "mail server"? At its essence it's just a program that listens on a port for an incoming or outgoing message. Then you have programs for storing, delivering, forwarding, etc. And maybe you have perceived issues of being able to handle lots of messages. But you don't necessarily need all that if you are not providing email for other people. What if you're just a casual user who wants to send or receive a message to/from your friend? If I have an email daemon (or a "service" in Microsoft parlance) listening on a local port, I can type some text and "hit send" (or whatever method I choose to send the text to the daemon) and the mail is sent. No email provider needed. If the recipient has her email daemon listening for messages from my IP address (and only my IP address), she gets the message "immediately". There is no third party email provider. This is how email works.

There is also no spam if we do it that way. Her daemon is not open to the whole internet. It's only open to me. Why is this so baffling?

Neither third party email providers nor some rule that "no one wants to run an email server" or "no one should run their own email server" are a part of the email protocol. Those are your observations of what people have done so far and your opinions. They do not set limits on what can and cannot be done. Are we in the business of startups and trying new things or are we here to preserve status quo?

Email is internet messaging, one of the oldest forms of it. Email is a message sent in a specified format* over the internet. What could be more simple?

*Granted the format is rather rigid, but it's not too difficult for anyone to learn. It's like writing a business letter.

Millions of people have an interest in sending messages to each other over the internet. And millions of people have no interest in sending bulk email for commercial purposes. That's all I need to know. A project is born.

There is a need for an "email replacement" as many others have voiced and as pg identified in his list, but I'm afraid it's not going to come from anti-spam zealots. I appreciate what they try to do, but I do not appreciate their mindless, blunt-force methods and ideas about "good guys" and "bad guys".

There is an enormous amount of bulk email sent every minute of everyday. Just because it is "opt-out" doesn't make it any less impersonal and unwanted (or any less of a huge drain on the world's computing resources). Can we accept that some people have little interest in receiving bulk email, and that there may be a market (besides you) for email inboxes that are not open to marketers, but only to known contacts? Alas, that's not what the anti-spam zealots aim to address. They do not want to curb bulk email. They just want to stop certain senders.

This does not really move me toward my vision of email. It's just the same old thing. An inbox full of garbage.

Mostly, it's worse than a postcard. It'd be like if every letter carrier makes a copy of the postcard, then is supposed to discard theirs once the next person has their copy. There is zero guarantee that any of the several copies were actually discarded, and it's highly improbable that they were erased securely by any of the intermediates.

Knowing that the messages are transmitted in plain text across at least two mail servers (often more), and across several intermediate ISPs, it is ... unlikely... for an informed person to have an expectation of privacy in email.

Encryption solves all these problems, but we all know that's not in mainstream use. Not even signing!

> For example my employer's mail server--which has been sending legitimate person-to-person emails for years (no bulk)--has ended up on blacklists several times because some blacklist operator decided to black-hole an entire netblock at our ISP.

You replied:

> If your emplyer knows its recipients (e.g. business partners) and can coordinate with them to run an SMTP service for recieving and sending messages on a different port, would that solve the problem?

That solution introduces a bunch of problems: you're running more software that's open to the Internet and thus introducing insecurity; you're asking people (who might not be technical) to install and run software and use a different mechanism when they want to communicate with a subset of users.

The other solution is to just ask the people that you're sending email to, but who are using a whitelist / block list to add you to the white list or exclude you from the block list.

You're basically proposing a whitelist solution, which has many known problems: it does not scale well; it does not handle new or unexpected email partners; it relies on the simultaneous cooperation of all parties; etc. In this particular case it also relies on spammers remaining ignorant of the new port for SMTP--which seems unlikely.