by pllbnk on 3/3/25, 5:24 AM with 31 comments
If you've used a @gmail.com or @yahoo.com address for years, you're essentially locked into that provider. Changing means updating countless accounts and risking missed communications. Often there's even no way to update the accounts.
Are there any initiatives or technical proposals for implementing email portability that you're aware of? Given the EU's experience with digital regulations, could they pioneer email portability regulations to reduce vendor lock-in? If it's been just a regulatory oversight, is there a way to initiate this regulation by creating and signing a petition or something like that?
Edit: I see that some commenters are focused on the technical aspects and how the email protocols work currently. Technical aspects were not the reason for my question. The reason is to know whether such initiatives exist. The goal is to transfer the power from the corporation is to the people via government regulations. It's harmful when a decision as simple as creating an email address on a mailbox with a promised 1 GB of storage 20 years ago keeps you dependent on that single provider essentially forever because the circumstances changed and email became the primary means of identification.
by palata on 3/3/25, 11:39 AM
- Use your own domain
- Tell GMail to forward all your emails somewhere else
- You can even allow e.g. Yahoo to send emails on behalf of e.g. your GMail address
It seems to me that your frustration comes from one single problem you have, that you mentioned in a comment:
> I still haven't managed to move everything away from my old gmail because sometimes it's impossible without recreating some accounts from scratch.
The emails sent by those accounts to your GMail address can be automatically forwarded to your personal domain, so this is not a problem. Therefore I am guessing that your frustration is that you still have to use your @gmail.com as a username on those websites.
And this is not an email problem at all: it's just those websites preventing you from changing your id (/username).
At the end of the day, the perfect solution to this problem is to have your own domain. Those of us who "screwed up" by not doing it 20 years ago have to deal with it (which is honestly not a very big deal), and we should teach the new generations that they should really have their own domain :-).
by jiveturkey on 3/3/25, 6:14 AM
No, nor should there be, not as you are thinking about it.
> regulatory oversight
There is no global regulatory body. The Internet is a loose federation. Even the DNS isn't necessarily sacrosant -- there are alternative DNS roots, the most recent I am aware of is to support ENS.
With that in mind it should be obvious that there isn't a way to make addresses in third-party domains portable. If there were it would be problematic wrt security.
Quite awhile back, there was this effort called ENUM[0] that seems to have withered. My thought is that because phone numbers are portable, via ENUM we can make a sort of canonical email addresses discovery service. This doesn't really solve the problem for you though, and would be itself pretty fraught.
by dorongrinstein on 3/3/25, 5:31 AM
by Leftium on 3/3/25, 8:14 AM
- Postal addresses are also used as a means of communication/verification (you can present a bill addressed to you when voting, etc)
- When you move, do you expect to be able to keep using your previous postal addresses? (Perhaps there could be some benefits...)
---
As others commenters have pointed out, using your own domain for email seems to be the best solution. It's like using a PO box for postal mail.
by slightwinder on 3/3/25, 2:26 PM
First it would need a new standard which decouples the domain-part from it's DNS and allow senders to find their target-server independent of the domain-part. Which means, there has to be someone who maintains a list of all valid decoupled mail-addresses. This would be a goldmine for spam. And you would need to adapt all software using mail, to support it. This could take a decade or longer to execute.
Second, this solution has to work even when the domain itself doesn't exist anymore, has to be synced with the official mail-server, which also means any new domain-owners mail-servers. You basically wouldn't have full control over your own systems anymore on the user-part, and have an additional external liability which could harm you service.
And third: Domains and usernames are valuable property, unlike phone numbers. There is serious money in this game, and regular lawsuits over who has the right to own a name. And this would poison the system and open door for abuse and even more lawsuits.
At the end, the little benefit is uncomparable to the problems it would bring.
by solardev on 3/3/25, 11:41 PM
I think your proposed solution is even worse than the existing system. Right now no single corporation controls the internet and domain names (well, except for ICANN).
Because it's only loosely federated right now, different corporations have to work together to come up with and adhere to interoperability standards. Google may own Gmail, but they have to work with Apple and Microsoft and Protonmail and Mailchimp and everyone else to adhere to ensure their email is intercompatible. No one company can break email for everyone else.
If you transferred it to a single government, well, first of all, which one? If you gave it to the US, that means Trump and Musk could directly read and control everyone's emails, which most foreigners would not want, and half the US too. It would give them absolute power over world communications, like the RIAA censorship years but applied to all worldwide emails and communications.
If you gave it to a multinational entity like the United Nations, then it still becomes subservient to the Security Council countries, to the detriment of all the other countries of the world.
The relative decentralization combined with shared standards is what allows any country, company, org, or individual to join the network. It's a network of networks, and any one operator can only control the part of it assigned to them, not the whole thing. Your proposal would give one government, and by extension a tiny handful of individual corruptible humans, absolute power over the entire system. No government can be trusted with that much power.
The existing solution, paying $10 a year for a personal domain name, is both far less fragile and far less corruptible.
by JohnFen on 3/3/25, 4:15 PM
by MattGaiser on 3/3/25, 5:45 AM
by codegladiator on 3/3/25, 9:37 AM
by brudgers on 3/3/25, 3:56 PM
(2^72)2^264 (64 octets @ 256 octets)
That’s why hierarchical schemes probably make sense.
Good luck
[1] valid address space is of course smaller.