Question is whether a new or updated protocol could force users such as "email providers" to change their behaviour.
Here is something to downvote, a series of questions:
What if email were "pickup only" _from the sender_. Not from some intermediary recipient, e.g., an "email provider". What if the the recipient had to identify acceptable senders before they could "send" mail to the recipient. Arguably this already happens every time an email recpient gives out their email address to some email sender. What if the sender did not "send" mail but instead uploaded it to host run by the sender and accessible by the recipient. Then the recipient retrieves the mail from the sender.
In the past, one large email provider had an RSS feed for a user's inbox. What if the RSS feed is not provided by some third party "email provider" but by _senders_. What if the feed indicates whether there is new mail waiting to be retrieved by the recipient. Arguably, something like this already happens, albeit using third party intermediaries, for example as millions of people use non-public webpages on third party websites to communicate with each other, instead of using email. Recipients check these pages for comments or messages from "senders".
A simpler idea that requires no changes to any email protocol, which I have tested successfully on home network, is for sender and recipient to be on a peer-to-peer overlay and run their own SMTP servers, like the original internet. The sender SMTP server communicates directly with the receiver's SMTP server, not a third party SMTP server run by an "email provider". Obviously, sender and receiver should not invite anyone onto this network who they do not know and from which they do not want to receive email.
The fundamental problem with email is that personal, non-commercial email is mixed with commercial email, mail that is selling something. That's beneficial to marketers, but not email users. Any change to email that threatens to exclude the unsolicited, commercial email will be opposed fervently.
> What if email were "pickup only" _from the sender_.
Congrats, you've invented DJB's Internet Mail 2000[1]. Definitely a good proposal for moving the burden of spam back to the spammers but I don't think anyone took the time to seriously consider it.
Pickup email makes one problem in spam much worse. It demonstrates that the address being spammed is valid and active. That's one of the reasons most email clients/hosts don't load remote resources by default.
Unless there was a google-scale grab-n-cache going on for those messages, I think there'd be a problem.
Here is a fun thought/question: Could it be that (using rss) only one of the two parties needs to remember/have login credentials for the other to be able to obtain them?
I doubt there will be a technology that can reliably exclude unsolicited or commercial email. How will the system know, what's unsolicited or unwanted? It can make a guess and that's what the big ones do. But it won't get better than this. I don't think there will ever be an alternative where this could be opposed.
As for unsolicited, this is already taken on by the GDPR and if you're a company that wants to sell their stuff in the EU, you pretty much have no choice than to adhere to these laws.
Software developers trying to manipulate computer users for financial gain make lots of assumptions about what people want without ever asking them. I am not a software developer.
Here is something to downvote, a series of questions:
What if email were "pickup only" _from the sender_. Not from some intermediary recipient, e.g., an "email provider". What if the the recipient had to identify acceptable senders before they could "send" mail to the recipient. Arguably this already happens every time an email recpient gives out their email address to some email sender. What if the sender did not "send" mail but instead uploaded it to host run by the sender and accessible by the recipient. Then the recipient retrieves the mail from the sender.
In the past, one large email provider had an RSS feed for a user's inbox. What if the RSS feed is not provided by some third party "email provider" but by _senders_. What if the feed indicates whether there is new mail waiting to be retrieved by the recipient. Arguably, something like this already happens, albeit using third party intermediaries, for example as millions of people use non-public webpages on third party websites to communicate with each other, instead of using email. Recipients check these pages for comments or messages from "senders".
A simpler idea that requires no changes to any email protocol, which I have tested successfully on home network, is for sender and recipient to be on a peer-to-peer overlay and run their own SMTP servers, like the original internet. The sender SMTP server communicates directly with the receiver's SMTP server, not a third party SMTP server run by an "email provider". Obviously, sender and receiver should not invite anyone onto this network who they do not know and from which they do not want to receive email.
The fundamental problem with email is that personal, non-commercial email is mixed with commercial email, mail that is selling something. That's beneficial to marketers, but not email users. Any change to email that threatens to exclude the unsolicited, commercial email will be opposed fervently.