Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

utcc.utoronto.ca

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 255 posts

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#31

Post by sofixa »

DoItToMe81 wrote: post #29
causi wrote: post #2

Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.

Sounds horrible. Mobile phones are bad enough, I don't want any more 'guaranteed' ways to be contacted by work or other annoyances in my free time.

That's where right to disconnect and anti-spam measures come in. I'm in France, and i have the right to refuse my employer contacting me outside of work hours, and they pay me if i don't. And since robocall spam is illegal, i get ~1 call every 4-5 months at most, to sell me a different internet or electricity or mobile plan, and they're obligated to respect my refusal to be contacted thereafter ( and all do).

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#32

Post by pjc50 »

bigger_inside wrote: post #3
causi wrote: post #2

Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.

also, (or: alternatively?) one that can't be/won't be blocked by the centralized services' spam filters. The biggest hurdle to running your own email server nowadays isn't the online time or the data volume or anything; it's that the existing institutions don't recognize you as part of the institutional club and block your messages... btw, Germany did this a decade ago: giving everyone an email account with the natio…

Given an account with the legal privilege to spam, how would you prevent it filling up everyone else's inboxes?

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#33

Post by lordnacho »

AndrewDavis wrote: post #17
lordnacho wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But we also all need to eat and use a toilet to live. Those seem to be provided by the market to a reasonable degree. Email is also pretty cheap and there's at least some choice among providers, though of course far fewer that food types.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. You can replace a toilet, arguably upgrade to a better one with little to no disadvantage. Taking away an email address someone has had and is their primary point of contact for years, possibly decades is irreplaceable. Being able to create a new one isn't equal to the old one. Not sure about elsewhere in the world, but even regular mail isn't that painful in my country. Pay a…

This is a good point. Maybe there should be a free forwarding rule.

I noticed that Yahoo now charges to forward email from my old address, which I think is unreasonable.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#34

Post by ajuc »

causi wrote: post #2

Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.

People already have accounts in national databases and there's a notification system using e-mail, sms and phone. Why not just manage the e-mail for them (and if they want - they can forward it to their private e-mail of choice).

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#35

Post by sofixa »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #12
ejb999 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there somehow a lack of affordable - and in many cases free - email options that we need a government solution to this?

I think the issue is that since email is more and more required to interact with the Government services, they should also provide a usable alternative. Why have your citizens rely on random foreign services from which they may be cut off because a bot somewhere is having a bad day? In France at least, many people (mostly the elderly) are having a hard time using computers and such. Some Government agencies have dedi…

The post office ( La Poste) offer free emails, so there already is a non-foreign not-exactly-for-profit free email service out there. Plus all the ISPs also offer emails ( by default, you get an email with your plan, and on some ISPs you can't refuse it), but honestly that's just a terrible idea.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#36

Post by lwhi »

I really hope that we end up moving back towards supporting open protocols.

I was heartened (and a little surprised) that Jack Dorsey recently mentioned that the draconian control of the Twitter API was the worst thing Twitter had done [1].

The corporatisation of the Internet, has undone a lot of the great work that had traditionally underpinned the network.

It feels like the slow, laborious and fundamentally equitable nature of standards ratification in the open has been seen to be at odds with the OKRs of tech businesses.

Businesses that sell and work with natural resources are starting to wake up to the idea that a degree of cooperation and inter-market regulation with peer companies can positively impact individual performance. Sustaining business is even more fundamental than making profit.

In the same sense; open protocols can help to develop rich and sustainable markets that benefit the consumer; as well as those businesses that operate in within it.

[1] https://www.revyuh.com/news/software/developers/twitters-fou...

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#37

Post by akvadrako »

OtomotO wrote: post #18
causi wrote: post #2

Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations. I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.

Would it suffice (tech aside for a moment!) if you could migrate your email adress with you from one provider to the next? Like for phone numbers (at least here you can migrate the whole number, even with ndc) The state could give out an emailadress like a social security number and you just use that as an alias and can choose whatever provider you want. And for these emailadresses the providers would be obliged to t…

You already can do that. Just buy a domain name, like mySSN.us. You are free to point it at any email provider of your choosing.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#38

Post by eberkund »

pjc50 wrote: post #32
bigger_inside wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

also, (or: alternatively?) one that can't be/won't be blocked by the centralized services' spam filters. The biggest hurdle to running your own email server nowadays isn't the online time or the data volume or anything; it's that the existing institutions don't recognize you as part of the institutional club and block your messages... btw, Germany did this a decade ago: giving everyone an email account with the natio…

Given an account with the legal privilege to spam, how would you prevent it filling up everyone else's inboxes?

Presumably it would be tied to an individual's identity which would make it easy to identify who was sending the email and fine them using existing anti-spam laws.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#39

Post by lrem »

cpach wrote: post #28
zekica wrote: post #15

The biggest blunder for me is that there were usable decentralized communication options before that were popular, but because of trying to monetize user's data FAANG started to tighten their grip on any decentralized solution, and I think they succeeded. They are already trying do to email the same thing they did to XMPP and RSS.

I’m not convinced that XMPP is actually such a great protocol. (I used it for many years.)

It's objectively awful... But when you step back a tiny bit, that doesn't matter. What matters is the inter-organizational community it achieved. If these organizations wanted to continue, they could come up with a negotiation technique like in http - both ends can use whatever fancy thing they both support, but fall back unto riding dinosaurs if that's the only thing that works.

Re: A realization of why email is critical infrastructure for the Internet

#40

Post by feldrim »

Well, in Estonia, they have a different approach.

1. If you are a citizen or a resident, you get an ID card to use for every public service. It's just a smart card with a government PKI.

2. The public services provide an email account that can only be used within the e-government services. The card is used for accessing those services.

3. The email service accepts either identity number or registry number of the recipient. So the recipient can be a legal entity.

4. You can and almost always do provide a forwarding address, so that you don't need to check.

5. You can't use it for other purposes. No RFC defined email address is shared with you. And it's just an internal system for official issues.

I've heard some countries issue mailboxes for citizens but I am not aware of the general use of these. Also, email services were designed to be decentralized but evolved into centralized systems, a current and unsolved problem. I am not sure about the privacy and security of government provided email services.

Post reply on HN