> It seems insane to me that people would willingly let a program decide to throw away inbound mail based on unspecified rules.
See, you say that, and until a few days ago I'd have felt the same. But that was before I registered the first .com domain I've ever owned, and oh boy has that brought them out of the woodwork - I've gotten more spam in the last week than in any of the past ten years prior! Not just email, but phone calls, too; I even heard from one of those tech support scams, and it's been so long since the last time that happened that I couldn't even tell you when it was.
It seems to be settling down in the last day or so, which is nice. But if it picks up again, I'll absolutely be installing SpamAssassin on my MTA host, for the first time in the going on two decades I've been running my own mail.
To be clear, I totally agree with your point about Gmail - it's far too centralized and unaccountable for my own comfort, too, which is part of why I don't use it for any mail I care about. But a lot of my correspondents do, which means I'm nonetheless in the position of either taking assiduous care to maximize my deliverability, or risking my mail landing in spam folders that nobody ever really looks through. Not a good situation, but at least until someone comes up with a plausible means of addressing it from the outside, here we are.