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They're begging for the European legislation to require mobility of email addresses as we have for mobile phone numbers.

• weejewel 6y ago
  Well, you can just use your own domain in gmail and similar regulation applies.
• Someone1234 6y ago
  How would that work on a technical level? Phone numbers are just sequential numbers, that are assigned to carriers, when consumers transfer numbers the carriers just re-assign ownership via an assignment swap. An email address by contrast is an undefined/minimally defined identifier in front of an @ and the message is just thrown to the domain to do something with. Which is to say, mobility is impossible, because there's no cross-vendor standard for the identifier part and even if there was, both parts make up an email address which would send it to the wrong vendor anyway. It is like having a phone number that ended with a network specific postfix and using it to route at the network level. It would make phone numbers non-transferable too.
  • dleslie 6y ago
    Basically it'd require a nameservice for individual identities; it couldn't rely on service-level redirects because the domain host might go kaput.
  • makomk 6y ago
    At least here in the UK, phone numbers are generally network specific - including mobile numbers. Companies don't just reassign ownership, the original owner of the number has to actively forward calls. This causes some issues when a provider goes out of business and Ofcom or whoever have to call around and ask nicely for someone to take on forwarding for their number ranges. (There's talk about fixing this with a big central database, but I don't think it's come to fruition yet.)
  • zaarn 6y ago
    Well, Google would be required to eternally hold your email address available for you and forward any incoming mail to another email of your choosing while also allowing you to send email via another provider (SMTP relay).