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The biggest difference technically is that with email, you can register your domain name and have control of it (and you even have the freedom to move between r

The biggest difference technically is that with email, you can register your domain name and have control of it (and you even have the freedom to move between registrars). With a phone number, legislation was required to enable some of that (keeping a phone number when switching operators). It still does not work across countries, for instance. With legislation, email forwarding could be just as simple indeed, but at least you can solve that problem once yourself! Basically, for all its problems, email is a technically better solution. There are practical problems with email too: Gmail will frequently put my emails into spam folders of recipients because my mail server doesn't send enough emails regularly to be treated as trusted server (perhaps I need to start spamming my own gmail accounts :)). I've had my domains for years (15+) so the risk of losing them is mostly theoretical (other than forgetting to pay and lack of consumer protection past 1 month due to domain squatting).

bcrl 5y ago
The same is true with phone numbers. You can migrate a phone number between carriers via Local Number Porting. The percentage of people that register their own domains are in the minority, and probably are a very small minority. The bulk of the public use domains controlled by their email provider, and they have need of something like LNP. If email had a process similar to LNP to migrate addresses between providers, I'd agree with you, but it doesn't and nobody is pushing to do that either. Technically it would not be that hard to do. I'd love it if there was a redirect mechanism where attempts to deliver to a ported email address returned an SMTP code telling the sender to deliver a given address to another MX record. Email forwarding as currently implemented is absolutely awful as much of the information about the original sender (like IP address) is lost.

bcrl 5y ago

The same is true with phone numbers. You can migrate a phone number between carriers via Local Number Porting. The percentage of people that register their own domains are in the minority, and probably are a very small minority. The bulk of the public use domains controlled by their email provider, and they have need of something like LNP. If email had a process similar to LNP to migrate addresses between providers, I'd agree with you, but it doesn't and nobody is pushing to do that either. Technically it would not be that hard to do. I'd love it if there was a redirect mechanism where attempts to deliver to a ported email address returned an SMTP code telling the sender to deliver a given address to another MX record. Email forwarding as currently implemented is absolutely awful as much of the information about the original sender (like IP address) is lost.