[JohnFen]

My social group has been shifting away from using the internet-wide email system to using a private one just among us that we run. It works well in my group because most of the emails we send/receive are amongst ourselves anyway.

All of these antispam measures are fighting a losing battle -- every one of them reduces the utility of email and are only (barely) acceptable because spammers reduce the utility of email to an even greater degree.

By running our own email system that doesn't interconnect with the internet's, email has become actually useful again.

[RalfWausE]

Hah... somehow i have this feeling that we are heading right back into the "good old days" of separated BBS networks, some commercial, some private, but none of them interconnected.

Somehow i like the thought of this...

[JohnFen]

We've already done this. In effect, we're running a private "internet" that uses the public internet as one of the communications channels, but does not interact with any internet servers beyond that.

It's really beautiful and freeing to have an "internet" that works really well, even if it is a very tiny one.

[nine_k]

But running an email system that does not connect to the wider internet also ruins the idea of email as a globally reachable address. Everything is a trade-off :-|

[JohnFen]

True, but I think the days of email as a globally reachable address are already on their way out. It's not exactly unheard of for some people to be unable to send email to addresses hosted by some common mailservers (including gmail) right now.

However, none of my friends use our mailservers exclusively. They also use the internet mail system. But having our own means that we don't have to worry about deliverability issues, spam, or any of the other problems that exist on the public system.