1) Have central control, central management. Facebook has this in their messaging app, and still spend millions of dollars fighting spam on it every year.
2) Have whitelist only email - basically get pre-approval for who can message you. Instant Messaging has this and people still get spammed on it. Plus you lose so much under this model - how many times a year do you email someone you've never emailed before? For me it is in the hundreds.
I don't know what your pedigree is in the anti-spam world (personally I wrote large chunks of SpamAssassin, implemented Symantec's Cloud anti-spam engine from scratch, wrote the Haraka SMTP server, and am one of the authors of RFC 6471), but this is called a FUSSP for a reason.
In short, build a better client, sure, but don't have delusions that you can make spam a thing of the past. It's impossible once you get any level of traction worth talking about.
I understand your point. I'm not convinced that spam with its dangers as we know today can be gone with any solution. I think it needs a long process to reach a point where sending out spam will cost more than profits coming out from it. I'm probably naive and too ambitious but I am going that path.
I don't want to belittle anyones work on fighting spam. It's very complicated and I do know the responsibility of the job and how all of us rely on it.
To be clear on our launch, it will start out as a mail hosting with a nice client having some cool features. All this questionable stuff on spam, parsing receipts, etc. is coming in the future if we're lucky enough to have your support to be around that long.
1) Have central control, central management. Facebook has this in their messaging app, and still spend millions of dollars fighting spam on it every year. 2) Have whitelist only email - basically get pre-approval for who can message you. Instant Messaging has this and people still get spammed on it. Plus you lose so much under this model - how many times a year do you email someone you've never emailed before? For me it is in the hundreds.