Email should be quite simple. It uses a very simple protocol to transfer the data from one mail server to the next one and has a very simple format. And yet it looks like it simply doesn't work anymore. Spammers and various web filters seem to have made it totally unreliable.
As you might know we are running a small side project, a german/austrian dating website named
Bienen und Blumen. As most websites, Bienen und Blumen uses mails to notify the users about different events (only if they opted in for this, of course) and because we already have a handfull of users, we gathered a lot of experience with this already:
There are webmail readers and even full native email clients which are too stupid to display the content of our mails and show an empty mail instead. And even worse, there are users with mail servers who simply won't receive our mails, probably deleting it completely without letting the user know about it. Sometimes, some clients only cripple the web urls inside the mail body at least.
Only about 5% of all of our users are affected by problems like these, but it's really a sad state.
No moral in this story, just a bit of ranting. :)
I think there is some kind of moral already in the beginning of the mail. The spammer and the filters changed the world and made it unrelieable. Just like you said.
We need a new mail system with proved or certified sender and recipient lists. Then it finally stops that I get this huge pile of spam every day.
Just like you register your web domain you also should officially register and prove your email. Servers should take this into account.