No, I think that there are just too many spammers, so big players have no choice except to make it hard to own your mail server until your server gains positive reputation.
I don't think there are many spammers compared to, say, 2005.
In 2005 you would get 100 spams to an unfiltered, widely published address, these days it is more like 2-5.
The continued lockdowns and protocol changes of gmail and yahoo are a sign of being overstaffed, "feature" oriented and yes, the attempt to shut down competition and the free exchange of mail.
You're lucky if you only get 2 spams a day. My parents are getting more like 20-50 a day on the email provided by a national ISP.
It's getting impossible to read emails, too many. If it were not for them being used to their email address and me being lazy, I would move them off to gmail.
I do not think so, I think the spammers are still out there, armed with cheap cloud email providers, but the "block by default" is putting a nice dent on them.
This is not true. They're not even making an effort and are quite probably actively malicious. There is nothing you can do to build up your reputation if you're a small email server. There are no introspection tools to give you a hint on what's wrong and no one to contact. Besides, what are those fancy ML antispam algorithms for if the only cure for spam is "reputation"? It's clearly an undefined term meant to be exclusionary.
A person from Gmail even posted on HN a while ago, stating they'll look into this and do better. That was about a year ago and the situation is exactly the same or worse.
