"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." -- Spock.
I'd rather have a few geeky people like me not have the fun of self hosting an e-mail server, than waste millions of man hours round the world because of people dealing with spam.
If you must hack, however, use something like Mailgun. It is more hacky in a way that you can program your incoming mail the way you want, not just install a mail server with a few commands.
That...doesn't make any sense. The author doesn't appear to be spamming or doing any kind of mailing list traffic. He is an individual communicating with other individuals. That's kind of the whole point of this Internet thing we have going here. Besides, he's only being singled out by Google; no other providers seem to have a problem with his domain and Google's own headers show that everything is fine.
First, it's about triggers. You are not allowed to carry guns on an airplane. "But I didn't shoot anybody." You didn't, but the people who do, carry guns. It's a negative trigger.
Second, when a technology becomes extremely mainstream, it begins to generate federation and structure around it. It's called evolution. This is higher in services where stakes are higher, and where giving an individual excess power can screw up other individual's lives. It is the same reason you cannot install your own cell tower. You can start a tiny in-house telephony service, but you cannot complain if AT&T declines to integrate with it.
Third, the openness is a wild, wild west concept. If openness allows him to install mail server, it also allows Google to block it.
Fourth, you underestimate the amount of turtles the spam cave has. A lot of very smart people, leave mail servers on for years sending only a few emails before using it as a spam weapon. These servers can be rented for high price on the black market. If you were a measly C++ program, it is impossible for you to distinguish his good motives from a bad person. From what Google knows from 99% cases, this server will start sending spam any moment now.
Fifth, you underestimate the effect spam has. This guy suddenly starts sending out phishy Apple looking emails, asking people to change password. Next thing you know, Jennifer's pics (or your wife's, or your daughter's) are online.
>You are not allowed to carry guns on an airplane. //
I don't think that's a good analogy. It misses the crucial point that the emails are being whitelisted by the receiver but still get blocked. A better analogy IMO would be that you invite me in to your living room for a chat, I say I'll bring the gun you wanted to see, you say that's fine. Then Google come along and muscle me away at your door because I have a gun. Then another day I ring and say can I come over for a chat, I say I have the gun you wanted to see, you say that's fine and that you've let Google know you want me to come over. Then Google meet me at the door and say I can't come in because I have a gun - I don't even get to knock, they don't ask you if you want to see me despite me having what you requested, they pay no attention to your request to them to let me in.
In case it's not clear what is happening outside the analogy is that I'm sending a message with content (the gun) that Google thinks is harmful. You want that content (to see the gun). You tell Google you want that content (whitelisting my email address, marking my email as not-spam) but they continue to block the email. What's worst is they block the email now without notifying and ignore the whitelist (they meet me at the door). You never get my emails that you want (never get to see the gun), because Google have made an erroneous assumption based on generalities and ignored the interventions of their customer.
Meanwhile - inside the analogy - a third party can bring a gun to your friends house but they happen to hire Google doorstaff themselves ...
It has the complexion of a protection racket: "Wouldn't it be a shame if you used some other supplier and your emails didn't get through, oh no. /s". Then as soon as the "you paid Google" flag is raised [eg by giving them access to all your emails] suddenly the exact same messages get through to the exact same people.
Google may be completely innocent but it stinks real bad.
It's a coherent opinion which makes sense, even if we don't agree with it. The claim isn't that the author is spamming, the claim is that the availability of effective spam filtering ("needs of the many") trades off against and ultimately outweighs the author's reasons for running his own small web server for his personal email ("needs of the few").
Soundness and validity are often confused in common parlance, if you attempt to interpret his comment in the best light then it seems well reasoned.
Your 'majority rule' analysis is flawed as the ability for individuals to access the internet without relying on [specific] mega corps or other major organisations serves the needs of the majority. The ultimate end of requiring people to satisfy a corporations demands before being allowed to communicate using the common means (email here) is anti-democratic, it gives too much power to those companies.
Yeah, but we are spending millions of man hours dealing with spam so I don't see how Google messing with this guy is helping (assuming his speculation is correct).
Google puts resources into reducing spam and does reduce spam, so it would be even worse than it is if Google didn't do anything. The author's troubles may be side effects of some of the things Google does at scale to filter out spam.
I'd rather have a few geeky people like me not have the fun of self hosting an e-mail server, than waste millions of man hours round the world because of people dealing with spam.
If you must hack, however, use something like Mailgun. It is more hacky in a way that you can program your incoming mail the way you want, not just install a mail server with a few commands.