> ... none of these solutions try to stop stuff from arriving in the first place...
While I don't agree with this particular "frighteningly ambitious" take on the issue I do agree with that the above quote represents an issue that needs solving. In my opinion, forcing the sender to conform their email to a format of your choosing simply isn't scalable. The reason email is so well used today is because it's so simple to use. This adds a layer of complexity to the people trying to communicate with you that I think would just lead to fewer people attempting to communicate with you (which could in fact be what you want).
I've spent some time building my own "frighteningly ambitious" solution (I'm actually planing on doing a Show HN on Monday or Tuesday). Essentially, the idea is that right now it's the people emailing you that control your inbox. Our solution is to give users control over when and from whom they receive email. It puts you in actual control over you inbox for the first time. For those interested check out https://lightermail.com. Would love to get your opinion.
The kind of email talked about by the OP, will not be for everybody -- it will be for those who get a lot of email and who have a large amount of social capital.
And frankly if you want to contact them, this kind of velvet rope is precisely what they want.
A recent problem I ran into was sending Xmas cards to friends and family. We had over a hundred addresses to send to and I didn't want to send them all by hand. So, I wrote a script. Of course, most of the emails went straight into the spam folders because, I guess, doing this just made them look like spam to most filters.
Granted, the emails were all sent from a shared hosting account, the mail server of which I had no control over as far as certificates and reputation were concerned. But my feeling is that anything I could have done to improve my Xmas greetings' success rate would have been exactly what spammers also try to do.
Aggressive filters assume everyone is a bad actor until proven otherwise, and I think that's a problem. Our quality of life is degraded whenever we make this calculation.
My script wrote an individual email to every recipient in my list; so none of them knew about the others anyway. I speculate that the email servers that received them, particularly the larger service providers, might have seen multiple copies going to different addresses, noticed that the emails were identical, and assumed they were spam. Usually, a pretty good rule for a filter. But in my case, not so much.
While I don't agree with this particular "frighteningly ambitious" take on the issue I do agree with that the above quote represents an issue that needs solving. In my opinion, forcing the sender to conform their email to a format of your choosing simply isn't scalable. The reason email is so well used today is because it's so simple to use. This adds a layer of complexity to the people trying to communicate with you that I think would just lead to fewer people attempting to communicate with you (which could in fact be what you want).
I've spent some time building my own "frighteningly ambitious" solution (I'm actually planing on doing a Show HN on Monday or Tuesday). Essentially, the idea is that right now it's the people emailing you that control your inbox. Our solution is to give users control over when and from whom they receive email. It puts you in actual control over you inbox for the first time. For those interested check out https://lightermail.com. Would love to get your opinion.