6 ms·

As evidenced here the impact of account terminations can have a profound impact on a persons life. Email providers like Google should be treated as utilities an

by tjpnz 3y ago

As evidenced here the impact of account terminations can have a profound impact on a persons life. Email providers like Google should be treated as utilities and regulated as such, they should be legally obligated to communicate with their users, ideally working towards a resolution. Until then you really should be treating said accounts in the same way you would a hotel rental phone.

bbor 3y ago
Would you be open to the nationalization of email services? Curious if your very HN-friendly sentiment also implies agreement with this very HN-unfriendly extension.
- tjpnz 3y ago
  Irrelevant. If my privately owned utility screws up they're still obliged to follow the law.
- kwanbix 3y ago
  What nationalization has to do with what he said? They need to be regulated. It is outrageous that they can say "you violated our policies" and do not explain which policy and how.
- piaste 3y ago
  There's little need to nationalize, since emails don't have a last-mile or natural monopoly issue. I think, however, that modern countries should provide all citizens with an official, public, mail address. Restrict them to only send/receive emails to/from a whitelist of publicly registered service providers with very strict personal data governance requirements (government, banks, utilities, medical services, higher education). You can let private companies continue to offer email addresses for everything else, anonymously and under whatever terms. (Much like how you can still buy a mailbox if you want, but you're always guaranteed to receive the mail at your address.) Just ensure that people aren't cut off from essential services.
  - utrack 3y ago
    Good idea which will work for most people, however it'll be an issue for dissidents or people moving countries. Those can use some other provider, while everyone else (99%?) can be covered by this solution. I guess there should be a provision against gov services making it mandatory for people to use the gov provided email.
    - piaste 3y ago
      A government that would punish dissidents by locking them out of bank accounts etc. can already do so by extrajudicially freezing their bank accounts in the first place (looking at you, Canada). In my view those email address should be strictly national and reserved for national-level services, so whenever you move to another country you should get a new email address at the same time as you get a tax ID number.
  - argulane 3y ago
    Estonia tried this with national first.last@eesti.ee email for everyone. Turns out nobody cared and they will shut it down on 1. November. https://news.err.ee/1608966110/ria-ends-support-for-eesti-ee-email-addresses https://news.err.ee/1608966110/ria-ends-support-for-eesti-ee...
    - latexr 3y ago
      Doesn’t seem to be the same thing: > The addresses that appear as firstname.lastname@eesti.ee (for example, mariann.mustikamets@eesti.ee) or companyname@eesti.ee (worldsbestransport@eesti.ee) can be used for private correspondence, while it is not part of the public mailbox service. Emails sent to these addresses are not saved in the person's public mailbox but are forwarded to the personal email address they've specified in the Eesti.ee portal (Gmail, Hotmail etc. accounts). And: > The decision does not concern people's official personalcode@eesti.ee addresses that can only be used by state agencies. The latter, which was not discontinued, seems to be closer to what your parent comment was suggesting.
  - danaris 3y ago
    ...Why default to restricting to a whitelist? If the government is giving you an email address, you should be able to use that as your only email address, that you use for talking with friends and family, etc. If someone's abusing the privilege, then there can be restrictions added.
- c-linkage 3y ago
  Given: 1) How critical email is; and 2) Existing mandate of government postal services to guarantee delivery of physical mail to all citizens; that Government postal services should run a national email service free to all citizens. In the USA, email would be minimally covered by the same protective laws as physical mail (I don't know if the same protections are available in other countries). IMAP and POP or a more appropriate mailbox protocol should be supported to allow retrieval of email, and online email size would be relatively small (say 100MB) but you could pay for larger storage like you would a post office box.
  - l72 3y ago
    100MB for storage or per email? For storage, that is way too small. You can easily hit that limit in a few months of light usage. All my utilities send me PDFs each month, and that adds up quickly. Last year, while doing renovations, the contractor and I were sending PDF drawings back and forth. I would have gone over the limit on a single day. We need something that lasts a lifetime with full archival and backup.
    - c-linkage 3y ago
      With respect, I think it's cost prohibitive for the government to provide a free and unlimited service. Your physical mailbox -- from which you get your paper spam -- has a fixed size, and every day (maybe once a week) you have to empty the box. If we extend that into the digital realm, it makes sense for the post office to provide a similarly limited post box in the free tier, from which you can use POP to download your messages to your private mailbox for permanent storage. For truly poor people who can't afford a personal server, they can use a web interface to access email, but they should delete emails (throw out the spam) to keep space in their mailbox. If you want more storage, you pay for more storage. Right now storage on gmail feels free because Google are scanning your mailbox and building your advertising profile. The government has no ability to get advertising revenue, so you'd pay for it instead. Finally, there is no requirement for citizens to use the government provided mailbox. Set up a mail forward to your favorite provider and you're done.
Borg3 3y ago
[flagged]
- camtarn 3y ago
  The constant parade on HN of Google Cloud Platform paid users who got their accounts shut down for no reason and with no recourse would suggest otherwise.
  - _cenw 3y ago
    To be fair, usually those people are on credit card billing and at a usage level where they really shouldn't be.
  - Borg3 3y ago
    Right. Because there is only google. And we should all use them. sigh
soraminazuki 3y ago
Not to mention that account termination is only one way email providers can screw you over. They can bait and switch, take your emails hostage, and start charging premium. They can put ads that look like legitimate emails. They can cut costs, and open your emails up to hackers. They can peek, censor, or tamper with your private emails. They can even impersonate you. Some people might laugh that away as ridiculous. But who can predict what'll happen in the next few decades? I find it highly unlikely that any single email provider will continue to keep the current level of service for the rest of my lifetime. Enshittification is real. Your email address is inextricably tied to your online identity. If you don't own your email address, you're handing over control of your digital life to the whims of a company. Because what can you do when your email provider goes rogue? Shed your entire digital identity? Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge. By borrowing an email address from a company, you lose control. And for what exactly? It's not going to protect you against the loss of access to your emails, contrary to what the article implies. Worse yet, there are no preventative measures you can take unlike with domain expiration. With all due respect, the article gives the worst advice ever. There's nothing worse than irrevocably handing over the keys to your digital life to an advertising company, whose business model is fundamentally at odds with your best interests.
- danaris 3y ago
  > Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge. ...Of the management of the domain and the email itself. But if Google, Microsoft, or one of the other major email providers decides that you, someone else in your subnet, or even your ISP or VPS provider, is not following the rules they've decided are important, they can just...put you in a black hole. And you have no recourse. And your emails will simply never get to people using one of those providers, and you may not even know that it's happening without a user report. (Note that this is not me saying "And thus you should just give up and use Gmail." I still run my own email server, and I've managed to get it set up in such a way that it's mostly accepted by the megacorps, but it took months to figure out why it was even being blocked, and then I had to switch to a completely different VPS provider to get around the block. If there's a message here, it's "...and therefore we should break up the big providers under antitrust law, because no one should be allowed to be that big.")
l72 3y ago
In my opinion, for the US, the postal service should offer free email addresses to every US resident. The Postal Service is highly regulated, and you won't lose your email over a comment on Youtube.
- jkestner 3y ago
  A great idea in theory, but a large number of Americans wouldn’t trust the government with this (never mind they can do this with paper mail—this is a different scale). I don’t know why we trust corporations any more than that. Convenient UX, I guess.
  - l72 3y ago
    That is why I suggested the post office. It is highly regulated but separate enough from "the government" (at least in the US). I expect that many people would still use 3rd party providers for personal email and less important things. But it is certainly nice to be able to have bank statements, tax documents, or any business with government services conducted through a verified email.
    - l72 3y ago
      Also, the post office would have lots of incentive to implement encryption (s/mime or pgp) as they aren't interested in analyzing messages. They would want to make sure that government services can send secure communication to you.
      - phone8675309 3y ago
        I disagree with this particular point. The US Postal Service has searched, read, and censored mail during wartime, and it's naive to assume that any provisioning of email service wouldn't have the ability embedded in it at behest of whatever legislation authorizes to the USPS to do so. Also, given the current political climate, I would be very concerned that the Comstock Laws are coming back. Can you imagine your email provider blocking or maybe even criminally prosecuting people who send you information about contraception, safe sex, abortion, or legal sex work?
jaystraw 3y ago
It's such a good idea, it needs to be implemented by force! If it is such a good idea, instead of commandeering the infrastructure of others, why couldn't the gov't just set up its own email service to compete?

by tjpnz 3y ago

bbor 3y ago

Would you be open to the nationalization of email services? Curious if your very HN-friendly sentiment also implies agreement with this very HN-unfriendly extension.

tjpnz 3y ago
Irrelevant. If my privately owned utility screws up they're still obliged to follow the law.
kwanbix 3y ago
What nationalization has to do with what he said? They need to be regulated. It is outrageous that they can say "you violated our policies" and do not explain which policy and how.
piaste 3y ago
There's little need to nationalize, since emails don't have a last-mile or natural monopoly issue. I think, however, that modern countries should provide all citizens with an official, public, mail address. Restrict them to only send/receive emails to/from a whitelist of publicly registered service providers with very strict personal data governance requirements (government, banks, utilities, medical services, higher education). You can let private companies continue to offer email addresses for everything else, anonymously and under whatever terms. (Much like how you can still buy a mailbox if you want, but you're always guaranteed to receive the mail at your address.) Just ensure that people aren't cut off from essential services.
- utrack 3y ago
  Good idea which will work for most people, however it'll be an issue for dissidents or people moving countries. Those can use some other provider, while everyone else (99%?) can be covered by this solution. I guess there should be a provision against gov services making it mandatory for people to use the gov provided email.
  - piaste 3y ago
    A government that would punish dissidents by locking them out of bank accounts etc. can already do so by extrajudicially freezing their bank accounts in the first place (looking at you, Canada). In my view those email address should be strictly national and reserved for national-level services, so whenever you move to another country you should get a new email address at the same time as you get a tax ID number.
- argulane 3y ago
  Estonia tried this with national first.last@eesti.ee email for everyone. Turns out nobody cared and they will shut it down on 1. November. https://news.err.ee/1608966110/ria-ends-support-for-eesti-ee-email-addresses https://news.err.ee/1608966110/ria-ends-support-for-eesti-ee...
  - latexr 3y ago
    Doesn’t seem to be the same thing: > The addresses that appear as firstname.lastname@eesti.ee (for example, mariann.mustikamets@eesti.ee) or companyname@eesti.ee (worldsbestransport@eesti.ee) can be used for private correspondence, while it is not part of the public mailbox service. Emails sent to these addresses are not saved in the person's public mailbox but are forwarded to the personal email address they've specified in the Eesti.ee portal (Gmail, Hotmail etc. accounts). And: > The decision does not concern people's official personalcode@eesti.ee addresses that can only be used by state agencies. The latter, which was not discontinued, seems to be closer to what your parent comment was suggesting.
- danaris 3y ago
  ...Why default to restricting to a whitelist? If the government is giving you an email address, you should be able to use that as your only email address, that you use for talking with friends and family, etc. If someone's abusing the privilege, then there can be restrictions added.
c-linkage 3y ago
Given: 1) How critical email is; and 2) Existing mandate of government postal services to guarantee delivery of physical mail to all citizens; that Government postal services should run a national email service free to all citizens. In the USA, email would be minimally covered by the same protective laws as physical mail (I don't know if the same protections are available in other countries). IMAP and POP or a more appropriate mailbox protocol should be supported to allow retrieval of email, and online email size would be relatively small (say 100MB) but you could pay for larger storage like you would a post office box.
- l72 3y ago
  100MB for storage or per email? For storage, that is way too small. You can easily hit that limit in a few months of light usage. All my utilities send me PDFs each month, and that adds up quickly. Last year, while doing renovations, the contractor and I were sending PDF drawings back and forth. I would have gone over the limit on a single day. We need something that lasts a lifetime with full archival and backup.
  - c-linkage 3y ago
    With respect, I think it's cost prohibitive for the government to provide a free and unlimited service. Your physical mailbox -- from which you get your paper spam -- has a fixed size, and every day (maybe once a week) you have to empty the box. If we extend that into the digital realm, it makes sense for the post office to provide a similarly limited post box in the free tier, from which you can use POP to download your messages to your private mailbox for permanent storage. For truly poor people who can't afford a personal server, they can use a web interface to access email, but they should delete emails (throw out the spam) to keep space in their mailbox. If you want more storage, you pay for more storage. Right now storage on gmail feels free because Google are scanning your mailbox and building your advertising profile. The government has no ability to get advertising revenue, so you'd pay for it instead. Finally, there is no requirement for citizens to use the government provided mailbox. Set up a mail forward to your favorite provider and you're done.

Borg3 3y ago

[flagged]

camtarn 3y ago
The constant parade on HN of Google Cloud Platform paid users who got their accounts shut down for no reason and with no recourse would suggest otherwise.
- _cenw 3y ago
  To be fair, usually those people are on credit card billing and at a usage level where they really shouldn't be.
- Borg3 3y ago
  Right. Because there is only google. And we should all use them. sigh

soraminazuki 3y ago

Not to mention that account termination is only one way email providers can screw you over. They can bait and switch, take your emails hostage, and start charging premium. They can put ads that look like legitimate emails. They can cut costs, and open your emails up to hackers. They can peek, censor, or tamper with your private emails. They can even impersonate you. Some people might laugh that away as ridiculous. But who can predict what'll happen in the next few decades? I find it highly unlikely that any single email provider will continue to keep the current level of service for the rest of my lifetime. Enshittification is real. Your email address is inextricably tied to your online identity. If you don't own your email address, you're handing over control of your digital life to the whims of a company. Because what can you do when your email provider goes rogue? Shed your entire digital identity? Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge. By borrowing an email address from a company, you lose control. And for what exactly? It's not going to protect you against the loss of access to your emails, contrary to what the article implies. Worse yet, there are no preventative measures you can take unlike with domain expiration. With all due respect, the article gives the worst advice ever. There's nothing worse than irrevocably handing over the keys to your digital life to an advertising company, whose business model is fundamentally at odds with your best interests.

danaris 3y ago
> Sure, using your own domain can open you up to mistakes. But at least, you're the one in charge. ...Of the management of the domain and the email itself. But if Google, Microsoft, or one of the other major email providers decides that you, someone else in your subnet, or even your ISP or VPS provider, is not following the rules they've decided are important, they can just...put you in a black hole. And you have no recourse. And your emails will simply never get to people using one of those providers, and you may not even know that it's happening without a user report. (Note that this is not me saying "And thus you should just give up and use Gmail." I still run my own email server, and I've managed to get it set up in such a way that it's mostly accepted by the megacorps, but it took months to figure out why it was even being blocked, and then I had to switch to a completely different VPS provider to get around the block. If there's a message here, it's "...and therefore we should break up the big providers under antitrust law, because no one should be allowed to be that big.")

l72 3y ago

In my opinion, for the US, the postal service should offer free email addresses to every US resident. The Postal Service is highly regulated, and you won't lose your email over a comment on Youtube.

jkestner 3y ago
A great idea in theory, but a large number of Americans wouldn’t trust the government with this (never mind they can do this with paper mail—this is a different scale). I don’t know why we trust corporations any more than that. Convenient UX, I guess.
- l72 3y ago
  That is why I suggested the post office. It is highly regulated but separate enough from "the government" (at least in the US). I expect that many people would still use 3rd party providers for personal email and less important things. But it is certainly nice to be able to have bank statements, tax documents, or any business with government services conducted through a verified email.
  - l72 3y ago
    Also, the post office would have lots of incentive to implement encryption (s/mime or pgp) as they aren't interested in analyzing messages. They would want to make sure that government services can send secure communication to you.
    - phone8675309 3y ago
      I disagree with this particular point. The US Postal Service has searched, read, and censored mail during wartime, and it's naive to assume that any provisioning of email service wouldn't have the ability embedded in it at behest of whatever legislation authorizes to the USPS to do so. Also, given the current political climate, I would be very concerned that the Comstock Laws are coming back. Can you imagine your email provider blocking or maybe even criminally prosecuting people who send you information about contraception, safe sex, abortion, or legal sex work?

jaystraw 3y ago

It's such a good idea, it needs to be implemented by force! If it is such a good idea, instead of commandeering the infrastructure of others, why couldn't the gov't just set up its own email service to compete?