Filtering stinks. It is resource-intensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and pretty much an example of something that is desperately flagging "the current e-mail system is failing."
Hear, hear!
You want to define standards? Let's define some standard for establishing permission to mail. If we could solve the permission problem, then the filtering wouldn't be such a problem, because there wouldn't need to be as much (or maybe even any). As a user, I want a way to unambiguously allow a specific sender to send me things, "spam" filtering be damned. I also want a way to retract that permission, and have the mail flow from that sender (or any of their "affiliates") to stop.
Right now I've got a solution that allows me to do that, but it requires a significant paradigm change, away from single-e-mail-address.
In general, your "permission to send" idea is a good one to put in the requirements list for a standard email architecture. But your particular solution stinks because it simply adds another bandage to a creaky old email architecture that is long past its sell-by date. IMHO, the only way that Internet email can be cleaned up is to create an entirely new email architecture using an entirely new set of protcols with entirely new port assignments and no attempt whatsoever to maintain reverse compatibility with the existing architecture. That is a fair piece of work and requires a lot of people to get their heads out of the box and apply some creativity. Many will say that the effort is doomed before it starts because it is not compatible with what went before. I don't buy that argument at all. In any case, a new architecture won't come about until we have some clarity of the requirements of the new architecture. And that probably has to be hashed out somewhere else, not on any existing mailing list. --Michael Dillon