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Comment by sjackso | Hacker News Reader

I've run into similar issues with a similar setup. It's frustrating. You can convince gmail user A to whitelist your messages, and so they'll get through to user A, but gmail user B probably still won't see messages from you unless you tell him to dig them out of the spam trap. And your messages to A might still be classified as spam if they have attachments or hyperlinks in them. (Even if you've been corresponding with A for several years!)

Once upon a time, to send email, you needed to use SMTP. Now, you must use SMTP, from a IP block that isn't categorized as residential, and which has never before had any association with outgoing spam, and you also must implement several ad-hoc identification protocols like SPF and reverse DNS. You should also use a domain name that you've owned for some time and which is not expiring soon. Every system to which you want to send mail will give different weights to all these signals. If they don't like you, their behavior is to report successful delivery and then silently hide messages from their intended recipients.

Spam is no fun, but the present situation is pretty weak too.

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The email deliverability issues we have had as a legitimate business are insane. Moving to an ESP years ago has helped, but it's far from perfect. I've wondered how a small business without the tech resources could manage this.

For instance, several months back some of our account holders suddenly stopped receiving important account info as well as newsletters from us. Tracked it down to a third party filtering service used by various email providers. Contacted them and they indicated that we were sending to honeypot addresses and/or doing other things that landed us on their list. We refuted all of their assertions (all of our recipients are double out-in, etc.) But , they insisted, as if their processes were infallible and refused to remove us.

Here they were, a third party with whom we had no agreement, yet they were interfering with our ability to do business (and profiting from it). We also had paid advertising in the newsletters per agreements with advertisers. Consulted counsel and the next step was to send a cease and desist, followed by an injunction on the grounds of tortious interference. Then, just as suddenly, our emails started going through again.

So, all of this, just to send email.

Yet, I still have to deal with a ton of spam personally when wading through my quarantine folder for routine false positives. Current processes are harder on the good guys than the spammers.

> Consulted counsel and the next step was to send a cease and desist, followed by an injunction on the grounds of tortious interference. Then, just as suddenly, our emails started going through again.

Dangerous path to go down; because so many spammers throw around legal threats too, doing so can get you on a different set of blacklists.

At that point, you're boxed in. You're already on a list. Begging and hoping when your revenue and relationships are under attack is not an option.

Filing for injunctive relief isn't a threat. It's legal action. Unlike spammers, we could easily demonstrate our legitimacy and best practices, etc. They would be compelled to remove us and not retaliate if they are a legit business and care about the integrity of their service for their own reputation and customers.

If, however, that does not describe them, then the outcome would seem to be bleak in any case.

In fairness, I've worked with a number of generally legitimate shops who've had exceptionally poor email hygiene.

Sending messages in the millions to domains which have been inactive and unregistered for over a decade, for example, suggests a certain lack of diligence in bounce-tracking or list-cleaning.

The emails had been initially legitimately added, but clients and/or email providers had long since gone out of business. Re-validating email every so often isn't a bad idea. Especially if you're relying on it for other purposes (e.g., account recovery).

We're clean.

For instance, our ESP detects hard bounces and auto removes them from our lists. We also use Webhooks to update internally on unsubscribes, etc.

For transactional emails, our ESP auto-adds bounces to an outbound block list, so any future attempts to send fail. We only send those to accounts with recent activity anyway, but either way, one bounce stops future sends.

so... your customers were paying a third party to block you, so rather than working with your customers to figure out what the problem was, you threaten to sue the third party.

No.

Our customers have email accounts with providers like Comcast. Comcast uses a third-party filtering service to handle spam.

So, our customers had no knowledge of the third-party, and some contacted our support staff to question why they weren't receiving our emails.

And, of course we attempted to identify the problem with the third party. If you read more carefully, you'll find that in my comment. Only after they insisted their classification was correct and refused to remove us from the list did we explore our legal options.

>And, of course we attempted to identify the problem with the third party. If you read more carefully, you'll find that in my comment. Only after they insisted their classification was correct and refused to remove us from the list did we explore our legal options.

My point here is that the recipients of the email and the senders of the email have very different ideas as to what constitutes a "correct evaluation." - and in this case, it's the recipient who matters, so complaints from senders of email should be simply ignored by spam-filtering companies. Now, if the recipients can't complain, that's a problem, but it's not like people don't have a choice of email providers.

You are really missing the point here and you have some key assumptions wrong.

>recipients of the email and the senders of the email have very different ideas

What does that mean? They sign up for our service and expect to get e-mails from us, which they don't receive. We have the same "idea", but the third-party is interfering with that "idea".

>if the recipients can't complain, that's a problem

I will repeat that by definition of the business model, the recipients don't complain to the third-party because they have no knowledge that the third-party even exists.

>but it's not like people don't have a choice of email providers

Even if recipients did know about the third party, do you know the switching costs of e-mail? And, you're suggesting that we should wait until all of our affected members get fed up and change providers (hoping that provider doesn't use the same service, etc.)? All of this, when the problem is obviously being caused by the third-party's error, yet they have no responsibility?

Sorry, but of course the third-party is absolutely compelled to provide some recourse for legitimate senders that are mis-classified. Too hard with all the spammers out there, you say? Sorry. Pick another business.

>What does that mean? They sign up for our service and expect to get e-mails from us, which they don't receive. We have the same "idea", but the third-party is interfering with that "idea".

That's not quite how it works from the end-user's perspective.

Say I buy a product or service from you. Of course, you send me billing emails, etc. and that's fine.

The problem is that companies take this further and start thinking they have the "right" to send all sorts of garbage to that customer.

Now, they of course let the customer opt out... if the customer is willing to spend ten minutes digging through their interface. But most don't.

I know you love those newsletters; they make you money. But don't kid yourself that your customers do. Many are going to click 'report spam' if you send too many. Even if it's not spam by the definition that marketers use, it's still very clearly unwanted email, and marking it as spam is so much easier than going through the unique-to-you opt-out procedure. And if your list is like most, some of the members signed up years ago (or bought something from you years ago) and long ago forgot doing so, so of course they are going to mark it as spam.

If you want to send email to your customers, you need to understand this.

Note, I'm not saying that you can't send that email; you can. I send email to my customers, and some of it borders on being "newsletters" - I'm just saying that you need to be aware of the cost- that cost is that it will annoy some of your users. Getting your email marked as spam is only one part of that cost.

>Even if recipients did know about the third party, do you know the switching costs of e-mail? And, you're suggesting that we should wait until all of our affected members get fed up and change providers (hoping that provider doesn't use the same service, etc.)? All of this, when the problem is obviously being caused by the third-party's error, yet they have no responsibility?

My point is that third party has no responsibility to you. They have a responsibility to their customers, but none to you.

Thanks for the advice. I know you mean well, but none of it applies.

I do agree with you on principle. We've been doing this for over a decade and have learned best practices. We also know what our customers appreciate and are very mindful of content, frequency, etc.

But, you seem to be overlooking a key point, so I will state it for at least the third time: the problem was NOT the content, and it was NOT being marked as spam by recipients. Instead, we were erroneously classified by the service as sending to honeypot addresses and/or defunct addresses. So, your assumptions about our customers, newsletters, etc. are just not relevant here.

>the third party has no responsibility to you. They have a responsibility to their customers...

Their customers complained to us that they weren't receiving our emails, so they weren't serving their customers very well in this instance either.

But, what you really don't seem to be getting is that they do have a responsibility not to harm us. That's why there is a legal cause of action known as "tortious interference". I sincerely don't know how to make that point any clearer. Perhaps researching that term a bit might help.

>But, what you really don't seem to be getting is that they do have a responsibility not to harm us. That's why there is a legal cause of action known as "tortious interference". I sincerely don't know how to make that point any clearer. Perhaps researching that term a bit might help.

Yes, yes, reading up on that is probably a good idea. I am not a lawyer... but in the case of a mail-filtering company blocking emails that their customers have asked them to block, they are harming the senders of those mails. That is a direct result of what their customers are paying them to do.

Or ad-block programs- really, it's exactly the same thing; what the ad-blocker does for the user does harm the advertisers. There's many, many places in the free market where helping one side of a transaction hurts the other.

That probably means that "tortious interference" is more complex than you are making it out to be. There are a lot of situations where helping one party necessarily hurts another, and helping one party over the other is generally not illegal.

Their customers are not paying them to harm legitimate senders from whom they wish to receive emails. It's unfathomable that you appear to see no dinstinction there.

Neither is it "exactly" nor even remotely the same as ad blockers.

>That probably means that "tortious interference" is more complex than you are making it out to be.

No, it means that your analogies are invalid. Further, perhaps you should look up the term before musing about what it "probably means".

That's a rather glib and obtuse way to put it.

I'm an Amazon customer. If Amazon can't reach my gmail address because Google started using some third party filtering service, what exactly would you expect me to do? Even if I had the ability, I certainly don't have the inclination to spend time resolving this issue. I'll go so far as to mark something "not spam", but that's about it. The cost to me of not hearing from Amazon is virtually zero. The cost to Amazon of not being able to communicate with all its customers that use gmail is huge. It's an Amazon problem, not a customer problem.

But GP did figure out what the problem was and took steps to resolve it without involving lawyers before finally issuing the C&D and getting an injunction.

> That's a rather glib and obtuse way to put it.

Glib, yes. Obtuse? less so.

>I'm an Amazon customer. If Amazon can't reach my gmail address because Google started using some third party filtering service, what exactly would you expect me to do?

If your free email address doesn't receive mail you want, I expect you might move to a different mail service. I think that if you want anything but automated support out of a free service, you are expecting far too much. Because you still seem to think sticking with your free email provider is the only reasonable course of action, I can only assume that said free provider is meeting your needs; that the automated support is good enough and that you don't mind the odd false positive.

Sure, if you want service, you are going to have to pay a few dollars, but there are plenty of spamfiltering services that are fairly cheap that do have a real person who will fix it if you tell them you aren't getting legitimate mail.

In reality, users consider "legitimate" newsletters to be spam... spending a bunch of time digging through the "legitimate sender" settings to get the mail you want and not the "legitimate newsletters" is often so much work that users just mark the newsletters as spam, and hope their provider will figure it out. Of course, this works really badly when it comes to reputation systems, as the billing stuff and the "newsletters" often come from the same server.

(really, if you must send "newsletters" in addition to your billing, you should do them from a different mailserver and different email address.)

You may be right in theory but way off in practice. MS for example accepts the emails and dumps them. It does not even make it to users' spam folders. So they don't know and we don't know. We only send emails that customers pay us to receive yet email no longer works. This is not how internet supposed to work. Spam is a major problem and as it is often the case the defensive measures cause just as much, if not more, problems.

>Spam is a major problem and as it is often the case the defensive measures cause just as much, if not more, problems.

more problems for people who send bulk email, sure...

the senders of bulk email vastly overestimate how much of a problem that is for end users.

>The cost to me of not hearing from Amazon is virtually zero. The cost to Amazon of not being able to communicate with all its customers that use gmail is huge. It's an Amazon problem, not a customer problem.

And... this is exactly the point. If the filtering company works for the end user, and the end-user doesn't want the mail (or at least doesn't care if it doesn't get delivered) - then the filtering company should block it.

My point here is that you don't have a fundamental right to my attention. If I'm paying someone to sort my messages for me, and they throw out a message that is important to you, but that I don't really want to see... as far as I am concerned, the filtering company has done it's job.

(obviously, if I want that email, it's another matter entirely - see my other response.)

Exactly. I would add though that it can be a customer problem too. For instance, when customers order from Amazon, they expect an order confirmation, and generally find it helpful. Likewise, if customers need to reset passwords, etc.

In fact, we learned of the problem when customers suddenly began to complain that they weren't receiving their password reset emails from us.

> Here they were, a third party with whom we had no agreement, yet they were interfering with our ability to do business (and profiting from it).

Well... that's an oversimplification. You don't have an agreement, sure, but your recipient has an agreement with them --- your recipient has decided that it's with paying the spam filtering supplier to filter their mail for them.

I realise that this doesn't help you, and frankly they don't sound like they're doing their job very well, but it's important to remember that the recipient chose to use their service.

No. Our recipients had no knowledge of the third party. Instead, their email providers contracted with the third party for filtering services.

EDIT: Not sure why it would preclude their liability in any case though. Their customers would be paying to have spam blocked, not emails from legitimate companies with whom they've agreed to do business. If they were blocking these demonstrably legit businesses in error and refused to do anything about it, then their "service" is helping no one, but is damaging those businesses.

It is simply a risk inherent to their business model and it is absolutely their responsibility to address it.

Right... their email providers, which they are paying to provide email from them. The money chain is still at your recipient's end.

Note that I'm not suggesting you did the wrong thing here --- I don't see anything else you could have done. I'm just saying that pinning the entirety of the blame on the third party provider is wrong.

...

Having read the rest of the thread: I'm sorry to say but the reason why you're having so much difficulty, and the reason why you're getting hostile replies here, is that as an email advertiser people are going to automatically assume you're in the wrong. You are on the edge of an astonishingly dirty industry, and anyone who works in email has been so burnt by the Neptune-sized tidal wave of diarrhoea that is spam is likely to spit in your face before you have the chance to explain that you are not, in fact, a spammer. And chances are that they won't actually care. To a most people, email + advertising = spam.

I really don't have anything to suggest. I have written antispam software, and I've read some of the forums of both sides, and frankly I don't know who's scarier.

>* pinning the entirety of the blame on the third party provider is wrong.*

We disagree. It's certainly understandable that the third-party might raise false-positives. However, what is wrong is when a business can demonstrate that it is not engaged in such practices, yet the third-party provider still refuses to cease penalizing them.

So, who else's fault would it be? Mine? The customer? The customer's e-mail provider who contracts with the third-party? Some unrelated spammer who makes the third-party's business really difficult to execute well? I don't think so. The third-party is in the business of profiting from the proper classification of senders. It's their risk and responsibility to fix these problems.

>the reason why you're getting hostile replies here.

Well, I didn't think the replies were particularly hostile. A little misguided maybe, but not hostile.

Anyway, I think you're also jumping to a lot of conclusions and, frankly, not reading very carefully.

Firstly, we're not an "email advertiser" in the sense you're implying. We're a member-based site with a newsletter, into which only members double opt-in out of their interest in our service. The ads I referenced are occasional sponsorships by businesses that are also highly-relevant to our service and members' interests. But, we don't just push ads and we follow all rules regarding proper email management.

Secondly, our content was never the issue anyway. As I mentioned, the issue was that we were falsely claimed to have been sending to honeypot addresses and/or defunct addresses. I enumerated the reasons why we knew this to be in error.

I hate spam as much as anyone. In fact, my reaction to it is probably borderline irrational. But, there are legitimate businesses with legitimate customers between whom e-mail is a mutually beneficial channel. There's nothing "scary" about that. And, my initial point was in response to an ancestor comment, wherein I agreed that certain "anti-spam" practices make it far too difficult for those who use the channel properly and respectfully.

How about let your members keep missing their emails. If they really want them, encourage them to sort out the problem with their email provider which is apparently failing to do its job? Since the recipients are the ones who choose to receive it, then they're also the ones to be upset when something goes wrong - especially since it's caused by their choice of an unreliable email provider.

I use email for a slightly more spammy purpose (double opt in but mainly to promote sales to existing users) so I wouldn't be able to make this claim if it happened to me - my recipients won't notice if they don't get my email and many won't care. I have to deal with these problems too, usually by manually asking the blacklister to unblacklist me, which they seem to do.

Unfortunately engaging users in a campaign to encourage their providers to sort it out is a bit of a quagmire. Meantime, our business suffers.

It's a good thought. Just wish it were simpler to pull off.

What I mean is passively let them take up the problem themselves if they want your newsletters. Since it's something they expect and want, they might choose to pressure their email provider into solving it.

Of course if they don't really want it or just half-heartedly signed up because it seemed like it might be useful at the time then they're not going to make the effort. And I guess that's the situation almost everybody is in when they find they're not receiving emails due to false positive spam filtering. So it's basically a terrible situation for everyone :(

At least we have these magic solutions like MailChip or MailJet (what I use because the free plan fits my usage pattern) so you could turn to something like that if you really had no luck chasing the spam list company.

> However, what is wrong is when a business can demonstrate that it is not engaged in such practices, yet the third-party provider still refuses to cease penalizing them.

They don't have any responsibility to help you do business. Comcast and your recipients are not required to accept your email. It's in their interest to do so, of course, because that's what their customers are paying them to do so... but their customers are also paying them not to accept email, because most email is spam, and they don't want to receive that.

Email is not a common carrier medium. You can't demand people accept your traffic. It just doesn't work like that.

> The ads I referenced are occasional sponsorships by businesses[...]

...which means, unfortunately, that people are paying you to send advertisements by email, which means that you're in the email advertising business. Which means that people will automatically assume you're malicious. Which sucks, but...

>They don't have any responsibility to help you do business

No, but in the course of doing their business, this third party cannot wrongfully interfere with our business. It's a key distinction that you are missing.

As to the rest of your comment, you are assuming that the problem was the content (advertising). However, I have stated at least three times on this thread the actual issue; we were erroneously classified as sending to honeypots and/or defunct addresses.

> No, but in the course of doing their business, this third party cannot wrongfully interfere with our business.

Um... they're an email filtering company, and you're an email sending company. Interfering with your business is their business! That's what Comcast is paying them to do --- Comcast want your business interfered with!

> As to the rest of your comment, you are assuming that the problem was the content (advertising).

I'm afraid you've missed my point here. The content is important, because having advertising in the content means that they will have already written you off as a reputable company. I'm pretty sure the conversation at their end went something like:

A. Hey, Bob, I've just got an email from someone claiming we shouldn't be blocking their email, but they're on the honeypot list.

B. Sigh. Again? Do we have one of their messages?

A. Yup. Here.

B. <spends two seconds skimming message> It's got advertising in it. They're a spammer. Screw 'em.

(It may not even have gone that far. I have no idea what format your newsletters are in, but if they score badly they may not even have bothered to look at them.)

My point is: you may not be a bad guy, but to an awful lot of people in the SMTP industry, you're going to look just like one.

>Um... they're an email filtering company, and...

It's funny when people start their sentences with "Um...", as if they are about to unleash some potent wisdom of which their target is unaware, then instead immediately go on to prove that they have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

And, now you're literally inventing imaginary conversations.

It's gotten really silly by now and I've repeated nearly half a dozen times on this thread why "points" such as yours are not applicable here. So, hope you don't mind that I'm going to get off this ride now.

Take care.

http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html

Internet Mail 2000 IM2000 is a project to design a new Internet mail infrastructure around the following concept: Mail storage is the sender's responsibility.

Because spammers can't afford a couple of TB of disk space?

What do you mean? A single message/template sent to a million people would be a couple KB... only the ongoing operational costs of hosting the server... Beyond that, blacklisting would be more affective if there was a pull based email model.

If storage is the sender's responsibility, then there would most likely be no reason for recipients to ever bother downloading unsolicited messages from addresses originating outside of their web of trust in the first place.

You could push spam blocking to the end user and client, and simply let them not download messages originating from unknown origins (similar to phone + Caller ID), without having to worry about dealing with spam in a centralized manner.

If storage is the sender's responsibility, then not only can they potentially get some of your attention, but also your location, what kind of device(s) you use to get email, when you're active, and precisely what kind of content is enticing you to click and what isn't.

A very tight feedback loop for generating content that will trick you, and hosting it for just long enough to see if it works.

The problem is not the few kilobytes of body. The problem is the slot that the notification takes up in my inbox and attention, which IM2000 does nothing to solve.

Well none of this is happening unless we are using a new mail protocol, and if we are using a new protocol we might as well throw in the kitchen sink and give you a new mail transfer agent and mail client application as well.

And in the new application: Address == Public Key, Address book == web of trust.

Your mail agent probably doesn't even bother to check or propagate incoming message notifications from addresses you haven't manually added to your address book (100% trust), or addresses within a certain number of hops from someone you manually added to your address book (friends of friend, boss's employees, etc.). And the mail client could further hide and ignore all of the notifications from below a certain user customizable trust score as well.

Spammers using botnets could not use hit and run tactics. Spammer would need reliable server that stays up long time and receive requests. One way to fight spam would be to actually retrieve it and throw it into trash. It would be equal to DOS-attack.

There would be more time to determine if the message is spam. If enough people mark it as spam and site is blacklisted or taken down, spam would be removed from everyone.

Bernstein is an incredibly smart guy. But he's also an example of how the social stuff matters. His software would run the internet if he put a little more effort into the social/political side of things.

The big problem with IM2000 is that it doesn't solve the real problems. It's focused on the economics of storage of mail, which, yeah, are a thing for a few mail administrators, but generally is considered less important than the spam-filtering problem in general.

I mean, I'm not willing to pay for infinite storage, but I certainly would be willing to pay the cost of receiving 100x my current monthly spam load if I didn't have to read any of it. Maybe even 1000x.

The major benefit of the IM2000 standard is that if you can squash the spammer's mail servers, you squash the mail in question, which actually could change things, because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now.

> ... because it would mean that spammers would need to control the servers they use to send for longer than they do now.

This is the reason IM2000 is exciting. Spammers only survive using hit and run tactics. We might see a 99% reduction in total generated spam.

Really? More than 99% of the junk email in my box is from "legitimate" senders who use their own mailservers. The truth of the matter is that it's already pretty easy to block the hit and run spammers. Most of the junk that gets through is sent by people with the resources to bully the spamfilters into accepting it.

Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

SMTP is not where email organization should happen. That's what email clients are for. Blocking DoS attacks and spam makes sense. Blocking Amazon Kindle promotions does not.

>Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

See, you still seem to think that it's a negotiation between the senders and the receivers.

My point is that you don't have the right to the end-user's attention. If the end-user wants to hire someone to filter out messages they don't want to read, using whatever criteria for "don't want to read" that they like, this is the user's right.

(more relevant to the discussion, the email that is technically spam is pretty easy to block already, so a solution that requires a lot of social/political change is inferior to the technical measures we have in place.)

Re-read the bit you quoted.

> Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

i.e. Yes, it should be the user's control, not the hosting company's, not the sending server's.

Spam is anything that clogs my inbox and makes the emails I want to receive harder to find.

But I agree, SMTP is not where email organization should happen. Blocking illegitimate senders at the protocol level is the most that should be done, and the blocking of unwanted content should be pushed into a more user oriented layer. Current structure isn't optimal.

If it's all the same to you, it seems to me that everybody and their mother has a daily or bi-daily newsletter advertising things I don't care about. I think maybe 15 companies are responsible for the vast majority of mail arriving in my inbox, and I care for none of it. Marketing routinely mistakes quantity for quality, as if yelling your message louder is sufficient for mindshare.

I'm really glad that gmail sorts these emails into a place where I don't have to ignore them, because I used to flag them as spam whether or not I might have accidentally given consent 10 years ago by buying something once. It was making email as useful as physical mail(read: not at all).

Just because I bought something from you once does not mean we have a relationship, just as a one-night stand does not entitle you to ask me to help you move.

I used to have your problem, then I clicked on the "unsubscribe" link in those 15 company's emails and now I mostly just get email from real people and robots I need information from.

> Spam is viagra ads and the like (unsolicited commercial email). Promotional emails from companies you have a relationship with are a different thing. Users should be able to easily filter and ignore promotional email, but email hosting companies should never block it as spam.

If you didn't ask my permission to send me those promotional emails, they absolutely are spam and anyone who sends them should have their emails blocked. This rationalization that spamming is ok because the recipient is a customer and there is an unsubscribe mechanism is delusional self-interest.

Its also law. Do Not Call for instance doesn't apply to companies you have a relationship with. That's why some major banks 'affiliate' with 100's of companies, essentially selling the right to spam their customers.

Its screwed up, sure. But its the state we're in right now.

I made no claims about legality. Yes, CAN SPAM means you can spam legally. It doesn't make unsolicited commercial email anything other than spam.

Your inbox != the internet. The majority of email traffic has been spam for a decade now.

99% of them have unsubscribe buttons, too.

That his software does not "run the internet" does not make it any less good. It's there for whoever chooses to use it.

That he focuses on the software instead of pandering probably makes his software better than the alternatives that aim to please even the most foolish of users. At least I think so.

Maybe I interpreted the proposal incorrectly, but I always saw IM2000 (minus the "notifications") as a "pull" solution.

By contrast, conventional email relies on "pushing" spam to the recipient (in practice, a middleman called an "email provider").

A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server.

As such, the spam would never enter the network. It would just sit on the sender's server.

Therefore, IM2000 not only conserves storage but also conserves bandwidth.

"A smart IM2000 recipient perhaps would not pull spam from the sender's server."

Based on what criteria? You wouldn't have the message headers/content, so you couldn't filter based on that. All you can filter on is the IP address. But you can already do that with SMTP by just responding with a 5xx code as soon as the sending server connects anyway... Or you could actually fetch the message and then spam filter it. But then, you may as well use SMTP...

What difference does it make which side initiates the TCP connection? If I was a spammer, IM2000 wouldn't concern me one little bit.

You might like http://the.mailman.ninja/

In wich ways is this different and superior to a fee?

People have tried and failed with fee-based email before (e.g. HashCash). I do wonder if the postal service could do something here: every citizen has an address, people pay some pittance to deliver mail to that address, and it's a federal crime to tamper with that email. Physical junk mail is annoying, but nowhere near as bad as spam.

If mail storage is the sender's responsibility, then perhaps senders should be allowed to seed their outgoing messages directly from their personal and home devices, and rely on others who have included their identity in their web-of-trust\address-book to propagate notifications of changes to their outbox, without relying on their ISP to do so.

If the sender did not have at least one personal device connected to the internet 24/7, then they can perhaps purchase storage and bandwidth from a competitive online market, similar to the seedbox market for torrents, without surrendering their online identity or address to a commercial entity.

It would probably be possible to build a system like this on top of https://ipfs.io/, see https://github.com/ipfs/apps/issues/10 for example

This is also the crux of the streams concept [1][2] posted here a few months back. I have even started an implementation as a side project.

1 - http://tonsky.me/blog/streams/ 2 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9829614

Anything which loses immutability loses in my book. Once I get an email it's my own copy, and it never goes away. How I'm reading im2000, the sender can retract or change the message, because they have the copy. I guess if I marked every message as "keep a copy for me" as soon as I read it, it would be OK - hard to do that while not having to read spam just in case I want to keep a copy though.

Detecting moifications can be solved with a hash or signature of the message that is sent out and always kept by the recipient. Doesn't solve the retracting though, or the social aspects of what to do if you actually detect a hash mismatch.

IM2000 is a good idea. However, I would propose at least one additional idea [0]: Linked attachments. That should drastically reduce storage space in a corporate environment.

[0] http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles/better_email.html

I setup my own email server about 2 years ago and gmail accepted our emails without issues. But outlook/hotmail blocked us for a long time until the second time I submitted an unblock application.

Maybe Google is stricter now. I often get captchas when using google.com now.

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