[icebraining]

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.

[overbroad]

Gotta love that Spamhaus logic. Spammers use cheap dynamic IP's therefore anyone with a cheap dynamic IP that sends an email is a spammer.

Is it cheaper for you to get a static IP from a VPS than from your ISP?

[DanBC]

"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.

[overbroad]

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.

[DanBC]

Your position is baffling.

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.

[overbroad]

Installing and maintaining a mail server. What OS doe you use? I'll bet there a whole host of dameons or services running and you never pay much attention to them. Someone else installed and configured them for you. And they just run all the time and you don't even pay attention to them.

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.

[icebraining]

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).

[jonknee]

> Spammers use cheap dynamic IP's therefore anyone with a cheap dynamic IP that sends an email is a spammer

Considering the majority of spam these days is probably sent through botnets, that's a pretty good assumption.