[tomwalsham]

There's an interesting disconnect between the public perception of email transmission and the reality, even from technically savvy observers.

The view you're espousing of the 'basic' nature of email can usually be summed up as : "It's just sending a bunch of ascii from machineA to machineB"

The reality of the complexity of email transmission is that it's an ad-hoc communications network built around an evolution of RFC standards, amended to accommodate i18n, combined with myriad third-party solutions and walled-garden 'standards' to combat a combination of real and perceived threats such as SPAM, DDoS, backscatter, spoofing, joe-jobbing, image encoding...

The main question around your proposed Auto-Updated system is what combination of these solutions are you using, how much are you paying for someone to maintain this, and do you care about the ability to customize for the inevitable false-positives caused by the necessary filters in place.

For large organizations there are solutions - Exchange being one - but they still require large amounts of custom work. The reality of Business A's needs still differ greatly from Business B, even though we're essentially just talking about sending 150Kb of ascii from machineA to machineB.

[fierarul]

Basically, I want to see the Google Chrome of email servers.