Their filtering really isn't that smart. It's just so much better than what people were used to with hotmail or yahoo mail. But it's no better than other well setup systems, and in some ways it is worse.

Considering your background, that's encouraging news.

What we need is a new way to communicate where spam is inherently not possible.

Spamassassin.

Spamassassin is not as good as Gmail but I still don't want Gmail. I don't mind giving up a bit of confort for political reasons. The same way I don't mind using DuckDuckGo with ixquick (!ix) and startpage (!sp) fallbacks instead of Google. It's a bit less confortable, but I can still find what I need.