Don't single out email. The problem is much larger than that. Any big megacorp nowadays figured out that the best way to do whatever they are doing is to provid

Don't single out email. The problem is much larger than that. Any big megacorp nowadays figured out that the best way to do whatever they are doing is to provide the service to the median consumer, and just cut the rest out as perfectly as they can. It started with the idiotic get a number to wait in line at the branch offices, IVR audio labyrinths on the phone, completely useless self-service portals, and now there are no branch offices anymore, and in many cases the "helpdesk" is just a dumb caricature of a robot in a fucking submenu of a tragedy of a hacked together mobile app. Sure, it's great that gmail is cheap, after all "it's free". But Google (and MSFT, fuck outlook.com in particular for their completely anti-competitive spam "protection" that only accepts email from other big providers) cross-finances gmail from their ad business, completely distorting every kind of service and product markets. --- For email in particular what's needed is a LetsEncrypt-like community-driven solution for reputation management and acceptance of emails from reputable sources by the big inbox providers.