zlacker

> Then move off.

Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did with phones.

>>Feepin+(OP)
You already can, if you use an email provider like gmail with your own domain name.

>>aphexa+e1
Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or your mail provider allows this custom domain functionality.

>>Astral+L3
So pay for it ? GSuite is $6/month and other mail providers can be found for cheaper.

>>threes+Ab
The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you don't have to pay the previous operator, in perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number without your calls being blocked.

>>lou130+0j
Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't have to pay anything but you get a number that starts with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to transfer it.

>>Astral+L3
SPF is trivial to set up for people who already have their own domain; it's literally 1 DNS TXT record.

I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC. Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record (to publish the public key used to verify the signature), and some mail signing software if your mail server doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely available).

>>umvi+bX
> Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail

...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.

>>lou130+T12
True, email addresses ideally should be more like phone numbers where they are not tied to a specific corporate-owned domain (i.e. "gmail.com"). We would need some sort of standardized lookup though to support such a system.

>>aphexa+e1
No. Terms and conditions do not apply. Anyone can, at any time, for any reason. Email domains are a historic accident; let's semantically decouple them from the domain system. The tech companies can figure out how to implement that.

The nice thing about a law is we can figure out how to do it after, not before. :)

It wouldn't be difficult! There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, an average email address is probably 25 characters. If every email address is forwarded, that's ~380GB of forwarding data (from address + to address) - and keep in mind that's the stupidest implementation and the worst case possible. I'd like to think that someone who offers a public email service can reserve 380GB of SSD for a forwarding table without going out of business.

Practically, I'd expect vendors to quickly agree on a "301 permanently moved" scheme. So if a Yahoo user is sending an email to a GMail user who moved to a private mail server, Yahoo wouldn't even bother pinging GMail (after the first time) because they'd know that address was moved.