Because the noise is so loud now that people are basically just coping with the stresses of work life by taking the easy path in the home life.

Because the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and someone you'd want to interact with. If the big providers weren't doing this stuff, we'd whine about the enormous amount of spam.

The solution is communications that are demonstrably not spam and not unwanted.

There have been lots of proposals to this effect but maybe you have to put up two cents in a crypto wallet, which the other person can claim if the mail is unwanted. If someone takes your two cents, you remove them from your lists ASAP. The receiver doesn't benefit meaningfully from the 2c so they are unlikely to claim it. The sender is only damaged if a lot of different people claim the 2 cents. Maybe a few domains are default whitelisted even if they don't put up 2 cents, to protect against entities that are important but would be frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar). If you use a provider that doesn't whitelist, fine, but you're going to miss those emails

Nearly all the spam I get has an email address from those providers.

Seems they are the disease not the cure

Mine isn't from those email hosts, but it from google cloud or Azure typically (not AWS for whatever reason). Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible.

>Related, the gmail spam filter is terrible. It seems insane that gmail doesnt provide a way to automatically send a mail (eg based on domain, keywords, etc) to spam. I know theres block sender but for example aliexpress uses a different name for every email so that's useless.

Most of my spam is from gmail addresses. Why Google hasn't figured out how to stop the fake Norton renewal notices is just mind-boggling.

Lately I've also been getting a lot from compromised MS365 accounts.

I think you misunderstand the disease.

What this is called is survivorship bias. The question I would ask is how much mail are you not seeing at all because it's dropped at the edge first thing because it's IP block listed?

Next, how much spam are you seeing from them because they and Google are the largest providers on Earth? Kind of like selecting a random person from the population in the US and going "look, it's a white guy". Yea, that's how statistics works.

Lastly, because the are good at blocking spam at the edge, then that's the last bastion of attack for spammers to put their efforts in if they want any return at all.

Sorry but bastions are defensive.

I self-host and don't have a spam filter. Spam makes up about 1 in 5 messages I receive. It's always the same spam campaigns that would be easily filtered with a few regexes.

Self-hosting allows me to use a different receiving address for each entity I contact, so I also know exactly who put me on spam lists.

It's been a while since I've been an SMTP server admin but when I was I managed a few hundred thousand mailboxes under different domains. Most likely know one knows about your domain and it has little traffic. On average I saw users domains get around 5 spam to 1 ham. Of course you have outliers. I had one domain that received around 1000 spam to 1 ham. That was a domain that looked like it could belong to a university and it got absolutely flooded.

Anecdotes are not a great thing to run mail servers on, broad statistics are.

I'm the sysadmin at my company and we regularly get emails spoofing our own addresses! It's wild that Microsoft can't even protect customers when they have all the info to do so.

> frequently spite-claimed (IRS, courts, and other similar)

These entities communicate via plain old mail, that costs more than 2 cents already.

Spam is a super solved problem though and I'd rather have false negative spam than email oligarchy.

> the protocol is flawed at its foundation - there is no good way to make sure that the person sending you something is a person and sending content you'd want to interact with.

There is and it's the same as other protocols including proprietary ones - a sender address whitelist.

There's no proprietary protocol that solved spam either.

A web forum's users, who love nothing more than using the "flag" button to stomp out comments they don't like, are indignant upon discovering the world's third largest email provider has a "flag" button of their own.

Third? What's second, Yahoo? I know Gmail is first.

The irony is that if more people started to self host again, especially jogger companies, the problem like one exemplified by this post would be solved quickly.

why do we cling on to the email protocol at all?

We have dozens of different ways to send E2EE messages to each other, with realtime publish-subscribe, and yet billions of dollars are spent trying to duct tape email. Who cares if Outlook/Gmail/Icloud use IMAP or Websocket? If the interface looks the same to the end user will they really care?

Why are we so willingly ceding one of the few widely used free and open protocols to replace it with incompatible proprietary ones that don't interoperate?

Experience shows that the walls will get taller and the moats will get deeper.

So free and open that open source email clients/servers are the most popular and widely used /s.

Protocols aren't proprietary by definition. It's a protocol. Anyone can implement it.

I'm not! Hosted my email since the 1990's, don't plan too stop. I do use the big services too but not giving my ability to use my own server.