The death of decentralized email

The essay argues that the open, cooperative design of email's foundational protocol, SMTP, was undone by spam, and that the resulting defenses (closed relays, blacklists, laws and filters) have not restored trust. It traces SMTP from RFC 821 by Jonathan Postel in 1982, when administrators ran open relays helping each other, through the 1978 Gary Thurek spam that the article says netted $13 million in sales. It says MAPS, a blacklist that was sued by several companies in 2000, later required a subscription, and that spam has stayed above 50% of email volume for most of the past 20 years despite laws such as CAN-SPAM, signed in 2003.