An opinion held by some anti-spam experts is that "Email is Broken".  These folks want to fix the spam problem by completely overhauling the Internet’s email systems and replace SMTP with new protocols that will not allow spammers to pollute the inbox.  They compare email to protocols such as Usenet NNTP, which was abandoned by the average Internet user years ago because it lacked simplicity and was not a very powerful way to share information and files, when compared to other web tools such as discussion boards, BitTorrent and blogs.  Or FTP which was abandoned by tech-savvy folks who know it’s security risks.

Replacing today’s email protocols with something new would be a great solution if email was indeed broken… But it is not.

Email’s success is based on the fact that it is open and simple.  Everybody can understand it, so everybody uses it, and that is what makes it so powerful.  Replacing the simplicity of today’s email protocols with something more secure yet more complicated, will break the very thing that makes email great.

Keep that in mind when you are building your killer anti-spam solution.  We are.