Ask HN: Would You Use a USPS Email Box?

Many times I read on HN that people are tired of having their email scraped for advertising by Google and Yahoo, but the pain of standing up your own and domain and mail exchange is so high that many don't bother to move.

If the USPS offered every American a free email box -- universal email service, essentially -- would you take them up on the offer? Are there any limits (e.g. attachment size or retention) that would make you say no? Or are there services (e.g. certified email or digital stamps to reduce spam) that might make you say yes?

Keep in mind that this would be universal email access, so it has to be simple enough to be universal; this would probably preclude many customization options like "bring you own domain".

If taxes paid for a free email box would you use it?

Also, do you have any privacy concerns with a mailbox hosted by the post office?

do you have any privacy concerns

Both of those I would answer with "It depends". I envision a 2 tier system.

Tier 1: FREE, paid with tax dollars

- Restricted to sending and receiving emails to/from verified and approved government entities and to other tier-1 account holders. This tier must be explicitly protected by the First Amendment of the United States of America. This should be paid by tax dollars and the UI/UX developers should attempt to make E2EE seamless but not perfect meaning that the government could intercept this if they so desired, ideally with a warrant one would hope because this is all official government communications. So this tier's privacy and security should at least be on-par with Signal.

- This tier >musti.e. family members, friends People should be able to send friend requests that would present a LOT of information about their account to the recipient to validate WHO they are.

- There should be little expectations legally of privacy on this tier and numerous warnings and disclaimers to this point. What I mean to say is, little expectation of privacy from the government, but good expectation of privacy from non US government entities.

Tier 2: Not Free

- In this tier people should be able to use their own email client anything that can do IMAPS, transport encryption enforced and they should be able to use their own encryption methods in addition to anything the USPS system provides. True privacy would be up to the account holder but they can send and receive email to/from anyone.

- Mailbox size and message size limits based on what they pay.

- When people abuse their account spam, flooding, etc... they are then restricted to the free Tier 1 so they can only communicate with the government until they work things out at the post office. If the abuse is doing something illegal then they receive a Darwin award and get perma-restricted to tier-1. Tier-1 holders must be able to access their accounts from within prison and would be a free method of communication with their family members. Laws must be put in place to ensure that it is impossible to deny access to Tier-1 to any US citizen.