SMTP is dead.  For those who don't know, this is the medium through which your internet mail travels.  Simple Mail Transfer Protocol.  It has achieved its purpose and has fallen into decline.  Our system of free-sending has reached this denouement through its very usefulness.  Each mail item that is received and replied to is a validation of the purpose of sending the original message.  It is available to anyone with a computer and a phone line, perhaps even more accessible than a paper mail stop in some areas.  And we replied. 

The cost of sending hundreds of thousands, even millions of email messages is negligible.  One response may cover the cost of running years worth of email advertising campaigns.  Email marketing's most substantial cost is to content writers.  People paid to misspell words with number$ and 0th3r non-alpha characters.  The knack to include words just legible enough to pique our interest.  We click.  Someone buys.  It's over.

Enter the champion of personal communication largess, the media conglomerate.  Clearly the open system has failed.  We cannot self-regulate, someone always clicks.  Our alternative to solve the problem of a consensus system?  Representation.  Authentication.  We are not a node on the open tree to accept any incomming data, we are a private mailbox which requires a known, verifyable source.  Soon we will be offered systems which will track our mail for us.  Media giants will offer us accounts in major centralized databases which will be tied to a credit card.  Only folks who have registered with these governing organizations will be able to communicate within the system.  It will look almost no different from our end.  We will still use Hotmail or Outlook or Eudora, but we will block any mail that isn't connected to the system, and we will be connected.

Step right up and peer behind curtain number two.  Not curtain number one, for that is reserved for a world in which people click on ads offering v41ium and bi66er is be77er and pay for the whole system of spam in a few easy payments.  Curtain number two is even more implausible.  Behind this screen lays a villain.  Where there is money to be made, there is someone to run the business.  If there is income available in running in a closed email network, then there is a drive to make that a reality.  Imagine that spam is nothing more than a shove through the door from public to private, from an unregulated system of open peer senders and receivers to a business of verifying users and validating messages.  The victims pay to keep their email box pristine.

The best that can come of this is a curtain number three where the public regains control of the medium.  Perhaps this will come in the form of a new protocol in email address subrouting.  Email addresses change every few days or weeks and a verification mechanism will be built into our software to accomodate.  Or maybe we will see an independent public domain addressing and validation system which isn't represented by Micro$oft or @0L.  Until then we hit delete hundreds of millions of times and pay more individually on anti-spam software in a week than it costs the entire online email marketing world to run their system for a year.   The cracks in the system have become glaringly apparent and we've diligently patched and bucketted.  In the long run, the dam is bursting and there isn't much we can do to save it.  New ideas are beginning to emerge.  Will we click? or will we stay free.