I can’t speak to the other services but this wasn’t true for the Department of the Navy from about 2005 on. There were geographic domains (@navy.mil, @usmc.mil,

I can’t speak to the other services but this wasn’t true for the Department of the Navy from about 2005 on. There were geographic domains (@navy.mil, @usmc.mil, @fe.navy.mil, etc.) that required you to get new accounts, but other than that you were within NMCI. Then NMCI got sold out via contracts that underbid and incrementally removed functionality. Now you can’t recover an account you previously had because they aren’t required to save the account data for more than 90 days (cost cutting) and they don’t recycle addresses due to spillage. Finding anyone without a number attached to their email address has become pretty rare due to that. Now you have two primary systems in the Navy (OneNet for overseas and NMCI for otherwise) and the USMC has basically broken their network off from the Navy. Further, each ship has to have its own email servers for fairly obvious reasons. Kind of rambling, but I’ve worked with that system for a long time now. It’s been interesting going from the legacy military systems, to what was an excellent system, then watching it decay into what it is today.