The internet has a blood pressure problem. People can’t just agree to disagree anymore. They can’t even accept that someone out there might think differently than they do. Combine that with all of us coming from different walks of life and the result is devastating. We’ve been at war with each other for all of recorded history. The idea that everyone will eventually come together and agree is not just naive, it’s dangerous. Because it frames unity as requiring agreement. It doesn’t. Unity requires respect, and that’s a much lower bar that we still somehow can’t clear.
Running a service that is home to people from every background and every side of every argument means I think about this constantly. Because what we’re building here only works if we refuse to import the worst habits of the rest of the internet.
That inability to respect each other is exactly what keeps the rest of us powerless. As long as we’re busy sorting ourselves into groups and fighting each other, we’ll never be a force to be reckoned with. We’ll never make a dent in the massive corporations that work to keep themselves on top and the rest of us on the bottom. That includes email. Google and Microsoft get to dictate the rules of email because nobody is organized enough to push back.
That’s what MXroute is trying to change. Our customers are Democrats, Republicans, Liberals, Conservatives. They’re straight, bi, gay, trans. I hate that we’ve broken ourselves up into all of these groups, because the truth is that it’s all of us vs the people who want to keep us from owning a large enough piece of the pie to dictate the terms of anything. Here, we welcome everyone but spammers and scammers. That’s our only dividing line.
One of our goals is to bring the rest of us together and become a force to be reckoned with in email. I want you to ultimately dictate the rules of engagement. Not Google. Not Microsoft. You.
Now, I realize that I have to be the decision maker to get us to that point. We have to play by the rules. We have to be blameless when it comes to the mail our customers send. We can’t give them ammo to shoot us all down with. But every decision I make is rooted in the needs that you communicate. I never wanted to deal with inbound email at all, yet now I work hard to fight spam every day. Because that’s what you asked for. I also brought you here with the promise that your email would be delivered with the highest chance possible for inbox delivery, and a lot of decisions are made to keep that promise.
But at the end of the day, this whole thing is about you. I’m not rich. I’m not aiming to be. What I want is to make you influential and give my kids a good life. To get there, we have to lay down our disagreements at the door. We have to leave the extremely divisive internet outside of this community. We have to be different. We have to be better. That means all of us.