I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
I think there are more effective ways for governments to intervene. There are essentially two separate issues:
1) Permanent allocation of names and numbers
2) Interoperability standards and rights allowing us to link names and numbers to service contracts.
Once these issues are regulated in a consumer/citizen friendly way (like they did with phone numbers in the UK), governments could provide some sort of default service on top of it, but in my view this is not the most important part.
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
> - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. Is it? Most people, including nomads & unhoused, seem to have smartphones these days (at risk of theft, but arguably easily replaceable). And 4/5G/PublicWifi connectivity in urban areas is so saturated. I wonder, is it reasonable for me to want government investment and legislation (but no other state interference) into some open source server project that we ca…
As a nomad, and someone who does run a self hosted mail server for fun, I don't think that's such a good idea. As mentioned, phones can be stolen or broken or just off. Do I want to increase dependencies on phone further by it being the primary store for all my mails as well? Each platform, which is not using TOTP MFA would still depend on email OTPs and so with a broken phone one completely loses access. With TOTPs atleast I get to save a few recovery codes.
The cost of losing a phone would mean losing all that data as well. Now, one could say we could and should keep backups. Then, comes the cost of losing access to new mails while the phone is incapicitated. Then, even setting up of email server on a phone with dynamic IP is a whole can of worms in itself and let's go with the easiest solution of using a VPN. So, now we need a VPN, a backup solution and a device to quickly accept emails when the primary device is down. Aren't we just building remote mail servers now? I do have a cloud instance serving my own email but do we expect most users to handle the infra? So now for making it easier for everyone and amortizing the costs let's start offering a solution where multiple people can run email accounts in a single server. Now we have gmail and other providers.
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
> - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. Is it? Most people, including nomads & unhoused, seem to have smartphones these days (at risk of theft, but arguably easily replaceable). And 4/5G/PublicWifi connectivity in urban areas is so saturated. I wonder, is it reasonable for me to want government investment and legislation (but no other state interference) into some open source server project that we ca…
You can’t realistically host an email server on your phone, which is what is meant. For that to work, your phone would need to be able to be woken up (to handle receiving a message) by arbitrary parties on the internet at any time, which is generally considered undesirable, quite apart from the bother caused by your phone ever being offline (sender’s server will keep retrying every so often for a couple of days, sender will generally be notified of this each time—and note the problem of the sender’s phone-hosted mail server being offline too if that’s what you were doing).
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
The United States already has that. It’s called the United States Postal Service.
I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack o…
Some have an obligatory and officially free email account for you... to receive notifications.. to pay taxes.
I ran into this issue several years ago. After complaining, MS allowed me to send email to MS properties (hotmail, live.com), but continued to block my email to their Office 365 clients.
I now use AWS SES to handle mail delivery. It's free for up to 200 daily messages which is fine for me.
Another useful tool is https://www.learndmarc.com/ -- I found the presentation very helpful when I was finally getting on the DMARC train a while back.
True, MECSA is also interesting: https://mecsa.jrc.ec.europa.eu/en/