You can set up a different mail server with a lower priority. I run my own server on a VPS, but have Google Apps' SMTP server as backup for those cases, and it's been working fine for months.
Assuming your ISP is not blocking port 25 and your internet address is not on some blacklist you can send mail directly from your machine. No need to use intermediary SMTP servers.
Is it possible that someone people might like to use their native SMTP capability for low volume noncommercial email? Does every person who sends email have some overwhelming urge to send spam? Such that we must place pseudo control over sending email, any email whether commercial or noncommercial, in the hands of "email providers"?
My ISP doesn't block port 25, but since my IP address is technically dynamic, it's on Spamhaus' Policy Black List. That said, my ISP offers SMTP servers for proxying outgoing messages, so I used that for a while. I switched to a VPS because my home server died.
"Spammers use cheap dynamic IP's therefore anyone with a cheap dynamic IP that sends an email is a spammer."
That's not what they're saying.
"Very many spam emails come from people running an email server on a dynamic IP. Some companies were happy to host spam sending companies, and would put them in dynamic ranges so they could continue to get money from those spam sending companies and keep changing the IP address. The ratio of good email servers to bad email servers on dynamic IPs is so poor that blocking all dynamic IPs is, unfortunately, the only reasonably solution".
You can be on a dynamic IP and send email. Just don't send that email from a server on a dynamic IP.
What they're doing is making a very dodgey assumption. They might stop a few hundred potential spammers but they also stop millions of people who could potentially be using email more effiently and reliably (and Spam Free) by sending and/or receiving mail directly between their machines.
Email could be even more decentralized than it already is in practice. This could potentially make spam far more difficult.
Reading that quote (from SpamHaus?) two things come to mind:
1. We are entrusting the rules on our mail delivery to someone who begins sentences with "Very many" and lacks the attention to detail to spell "reasonable" correctly. Make of that what you will.
2. The "problem" is not the existence of "bad email servers" on dynamic IP's, it is the lack of "good email servers" on dynamic IP's. Why the heck aren't the millions of people on dynamic IP's using this capability? Answer: They do not know it exists.
To "replace email", we do not necessarily need to fundamentally change anything about how email works. What we need to do, perhaps, is replace the people controlling it and instruct "good" people how it works. As it stands, in general, the only folks who understand how email works are a. email providers (e.g. ISP's), b. spammers and c. spam fighters.
If the vast majority of email sent directly to recipients from dynamic IP's was low volume and noncommercial, the "bad apples" would be overshadowed by the good ones. And so would the anti-spam zealots be overshadowed by reasonable people who just want to communicate with each other (not necessarily trying to sell ED treatments to the whole of humanity).
Education is the way forward. People arguing against any sort of consumer education on something so basic as internet messaging are an interesting spectacle to behold. Their attitude should fuel the fire of anyone working on this "dangerous idea" of "replacing email". You know who you are.
It's not a quote from spamhaus. It's me re-wording your text.
> Why the heck aren't the millions of people on dynamic IP's using this capability? Answer: They do not know it exists.
No. Millions of people have no interest in running their own email server. What benefit do most people get from running their own server? (Where most people are those who have one or two email addresses, which they use for a couple of hundred contacts.) What benefit do small businesses get from running their own email server, rather than paying someone else to host the server?
> If the vast majority of email sent directly to recipients from dynamic IP's was low volume and noncommercial, the "bad apples" would be overshadowed by the good ones.
You clearly have no idea just how many spam emails were being sent. Something like 90% - 95% of all email was UBE. Much of this was sent from botnetted machines, and many of those would have been on dynamic IPs.
> anti-spam zealots
Conversation is fruitless if you attack the people who have the same aims as you.
> People arguing against any sort of consumer education on something so basic as internet messaging are an interesting spectacle to behold
But you're not suggesting to educate people on internet messaging. You're suggesting that people are educated on installing and maintaining a mail server.
Well, yes, because my ISP only offers static IPs for business contracts, which are more expensive overall, and my VPS only costs $2.3/month (and it doubles as a web server, hosting my personal landing page and an instance of Tiny Tiny RSS).