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You're still benefitting from everybody else's more sophisticated spam filtering. The fact that most users have good filtering means that the cost/benefit ratio

You're still benefitting from everybody else's more sophisticated spam filtering. The fact that most users have good filtering means that the cost/benefit ratio of sending spam is much worse than it otherwise would be. This naturally decreases the activity significantly. Saying that you get by with just basic blocking is the e-mail equivalent of saying that you don't need a measles vaccine. It may be true but it doesn't tell us much about what the world would look like without those measures.

joveian 8y ago
Where is the evidence that this is true? It doesn't seem that likely to me that so few people are not using gmail-style spam filtering that spammers couldn't figure out how to target those of us who aren't (the filtering that I could have used but turned off is more random than helpful and I would guess this is the case on many non-Google mail providers). Even with Google running a huge portion of all email there are still a huge number of people with email not provided by Google. An alternative narrative is that previously email servers were supposed to accept almost anything from everyone and spammers took advantage of this. From this perspective it is the relatively recent requirement of sender verification that made the key difference and allows Spamhaus to work (obviously they need to do something to determine who to block). This perspective seems to match what I am seeing.