Is Gmail killing independent email?
Indirectly.<p>More directly: spammers are killing independent email. Email's peer-node-trust story is so "version 1.0 Internet" that webmasters are left basically using heuristsics, shared models, and tea-leaves to determine whether arbitrary incoming messages should be trustworthy or not, and "they should not" 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 "Users generally consider themselves better served if most unsolicited email they receive with no strong trust priors drops into a black hole." But that makes it very hard to be a newcomer who wants to establish trust priors.