My idea of how a modern mailing service should work (2011)

Then look at it another way:

What if you, and other people who don’t have the time / resources / energy to deal with IP reputation, found people who did have that time and energy, instead of just throwing your hands in the air and giving all your control over to Google, Microsoft or Amazon?

The way the Internet worked way back when is that when someone did something shitty or illegal, you’d do a WHOIS lookup and you’d send an email to the network admin.

Now, we get thousands of intrusion attempts and hundreds or thousands of attempted spam deliveries a day from Google / Amazon / Microsoft, and they couldn’t give a shit.

Having more smaller email providers can be a very good thing. For one, they generally care much more about cutting off spammers when they’re told about abuse.

I’m kinda torn. I agree that the IP reputation is one of the bigger, if not the biggest problems.

But if no one would try to use one of (1-10, whatever) big mailing services, then the incumbents maybe wouldn’t have so much power to just do and blacklist who they want.