Is Gmail killing independent email?
Indirectly.<p>More directly: spammers are killing independent email. Email&#x27;s peer-node-trust story is so &quot;version 1.0 Internet&quot; that webmasters are left basically using heuristsics, shared models, and tea-leaves to determine whether arbitrary incoming messages should be trustworthy or not, and &quot;they should not&quot; is a good first-pass guess!<p>So Google (as the thousand-pound gorilla) is serving as a lightning-rod for a larger network-effect problem, which is &quot;Users generally consider themselves better served if most unsolicited email they receive with no strong trust priors drops into a black hole.&quot; But that makes it very hard to be a newcomer who wants to establish trust priors.