yes, but as someone who's worked on the sending of emails side of this i can assure you that the techniques for fighting spam are TOO effective. There are many legit emails that go into black holes before any standard idea of spam filtering comes into play. I wrote an embeddable smtp server so that you could have an app that sent email without ever asking your users to put in their SMTP server info... it was USELESS because of SPF filtering. The blacklisting of whole IP ranges means that no app could use it on a home computer because all those IPs are banned.

we definitely need a better solution to fighting spam.

I hear this all the time, but the culprit is always someone sending spam, who does not consider it spam. Usually stuff like missing unsubscribes, spammy language, sending bulk to bought email lists, etc.

As someone running a personal email server for >10 years I can promise you this is a legitimate problem and the false-positive issue is not even close to solved. It's just that most people use a big provider to send personal email, so nobody is incentivized to care about solving it.

For a company I worked for, it was transactional emails (recipes) that would get blackholed. So while you're probably right that a lot of people doing legit marketing, but not 100% correctly often complain, it's also people doing legit work as well.

I assume you mean rarely receive spam that ends up in your inbox. Or does your email someone not receive any spam at all?

It's the former. I use gmail and for me, they are almost perfect. It's been probably three or four years since my last false positive and less than 1% of the email I do see is spam that was missed.

For phone calls, somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of my calls are robocalls or other telemarketing (I receive far more emails than phone calls).

If there were an easy way to tell my phone to just drop callers if they aren't in my phone book, I would. Right now, my phone lets me know if a caller is a suspected spammer, but when I hit dismiss, it goes to voicemail. I'd rather have the call just dropped or for the caller to get a busy signal. That reminds me - I can't remember the last time I heard a busy signal.

My only phone number that people have is a Google Voice number and it's really funny when I have five five-second silent voicemails every day. Because none of them ever go through to my phone...

I get more spam and more robocalls every single day. I can't rely on even Gmail's spam filter, because it has a non-negligible amount of false-positives.

My situation is the exact opposite. I almost never get robocalls but email spam is getting worse every month!