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I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which ar

I think that governments should offer one free email account per citizen for life. Which you could use or not, but is there for you as a digital inbox… which are the options? - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. - A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. - A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack of privacy. - A free for life government issued, easy to recover digital point of contact where all your government interactions are pointed towards would be a great step. You could still have a separate one if you don’t trust big brother, but at least your “recovery” address would be secure for life.

benbristow 3y ago
Ah yes, a government owned email service, what could go wrong?
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Nothing? It can exist as a utility alongside other email services.
  - iAMkenough 3y ago
    Nothing can go wrong? In that case, the government should create a public social network as a utility alongside other social media services too.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Sure, although I think the utility of a communications network capable of receiving and sending documents within a country is very well proven to be a benefit to society, so any comparison to something less battle tested seems unnecessary. It makes no sense that in the physical world, we entrust government with identity verification and transmitting correspondence, but that trust is somehow lost in the digital world.
      - iAMkenough 3y ago
        I think the utility of a social communications network capable of receiving and sending updates within a country is a very well proven benefit to society, so any attempt to draw a line between email and social updates seems unnecessary. Each US citizen deserves access to a public network to express their First Amendment right without moderation.
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        > Each US citizen deserves access to a public network to express their First Amendment right without moderation. Sure, make access to the internet an inalienable right also, but web hosting and domains are cheap enough that that should suffice. The network is the internet, and if people want to visit your website to see what you are saying, they can.
- xorcist 3y ago
  Several countries have them. Maybe ask them? The reality is that it is about as exciting as getting your paper postal mail delivered in your physical mailbox.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  Well, the government owned physical mail service worked pretty well for a few centuries, so... Not much? Now, of course, you shouldn't be organizing a criminal conspiracy or in general much anti-government protests over the mail or government-downed email. But the majority of communication is quite benign, and so having a government email for the 80% use case (bills, party invites, holiday wishes, etc) would be great. You can use a separate service for your more sensitive communication.
stbenjam 3y ago
This would probably work in a lot of European countries or places with high levels of government trust. I could see the German post office for example offering something like this and getting wide acceptance. You’ll have a lot of distrustful Americans commenting how terrible this idea is and the government can’t be trusted. They’d rather get it from a corporation and be subjected to unlimited surveillance capitalism and manipulation.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  "Think about the children" is pretty effective in Europe. They don't require to violate privacy when they could just make a law with popular support. They are pushing for all the messaging apps to provide unencrypted data to government.[1] [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-europe-as-france-and-germany-call-for-decrypt-law/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-e...
- hadrien01 3y ago
  The French post office does offer an email service: https://www.laposte.net/accueil https://www.laposte.net/accueil
  - anticensor 3y ago
    Can it communicate with outside email? Some countries have a similar service that cannot communicate with outside email.
    - seszett 3y ago
      It's just a regular email provider. I'm not sure I would trust it to keep working forever, but for the last 15 years or so it's been fine.
- judge2020 3y ago
  How does anyone have trust in their government besides to provide basic services? Every single government is hellbent on mass surveillance, and the EU is currently leading the way, not the US: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-back-web-security-12-years https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-b...
chris-orgmenta 3y ago
> - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. Is it? Most people, including nomads & unhoused, seem to have smartphones these days (at risk of theft, but arguably easily replaceable). And 4/5G/PublicWifi connectivity in urban areas is so saturated. I wonder, is it reasonable for me to want government investment and legislation (but no other state interference) into some open source server project that we can run on our phones for this? (heck, give us mesh network functionality too while you're at it). And am I reasonable in my (left-leaning thought) that, like sexual health consumables, mobile phones should be subsidised by tax revenue, along with other necessities/'empowering tools'?
- harshitaneja 3y ago
  As a nomad, and someone who does run a self hosted mail server for fun, I don't think that's such a good idea. As mentioned, phones can be stolen or broken or just off. Do I want to increase dependencies on phone further by it being the primary store for all my mails as well? Each platform, which is not using TOTP MFA would still depend on email OTPs and so with a broken phone one completely loses access. With TOTPs atleast I get to save a few recovery codes. The cost of losing a phone would mean losing all that data as well. Now, one could say we could and should keep backups. Then, comes the cost of losing access to new mails while the phone is incapicitated. Then, even setting up of email server on a phone with dynamic IP is a whole can of worms in itself and let's go with the easiest solution of using a VPN. So, now we need a VPN, a backup solution and a device to quickly accept emails when the primary device is down. Aren't we just building remote mail servers now? I do have a cloud instance serving my own email but do we expect most users to handle the infra? So now for making it easier for everyone and amortizing the costs let's start offering a solution where multiple people can run email accounts in a single server. Now we have gmail and other providers.
  - chris-orgmenta 3y ago
    I suppose I haven't been fully compelled by any of these replies (but I don't have anything compelling in return). Sorry, my lack of knowledge is the failure here (Dunning Kruger effect: I don't see why dynamic IPs / mac addresses / OTP / VPN / encryption are real insurmountable issues here) Also nomadic, also in tech - And I would happily run a mail server on my phone, sacrifice thickness of phone for the extra necessary battery life, and keep a spare phone somewhere for quick restore/swap (I have a spare old android I keep in case I break my current one, which I can keep at a friend's place, an Airbnb or a subscription locker / safe. What's the alternative being proposed though, Google et al? Or a home server (I have no home)? Or still free market, but providers are smaller businesses that are more heavily legislated and are watched over by the state to ensure our data is safe? I'm just not sure 'where' my data+computing should be, other than right next to me in my pocket (but then where do my backups go?). Sorry for the appalling and directionless writing, it's just that everything just seems to circle back to the solution being: *'two small portable battery operated wireless devices that we have control of and the big providers do not have access to; keep one of them on our person and one in another safe place for DR purposes.'*
tambre 3y ago
Estonia has personalidentificationcode@eesti.ee and registrycode@eesti.ee, which you are supposed to set up to forward to your actual email aadress. Unfortunately these are restricted for use by governmental agencies for important official notifications (e.g. you're being conscripted, your marital status changed, something has changed in regard to a property you own). [0] You could create a public alias of the form firstname.lastname.n@eesti.ee, but creation of those was ended in 2018 and they were shutdown in November 2023. [1] [0] https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-notification-service-of-eestiee https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-noti... [1] https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > Unfortunately these are restricted for use by governmental agencies for important official notifications (e.g. you're being conscripted, your marital status changed, something has changed in regard to a property you own). When your marital status changes, isn't that a notification that goes from you to the government, and not the other way around?
  - emmet 3y ago
    Your tax codes aren’t going to update the minute you say your vows. Someone needs to do that on the other side and let you know when it’s been processed.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      Why? Does anything change after it's been processed? What are you going to do differently at that point?
      - mgbmtl 3y ago
        I guess it depends if the government recognizes the marriage date that is declared, or the date that they process it (if the marriage was not in front of an official). Divorce date can be pretty random, since it's rarely done live by a judge/official.
regularfry 3y ago
In practical terms the government-issued option would be provided by a corporate player. Option 4 is option 3.
fauigerzigerk 3y ago
I think there are more effective ways for governments to intervene. There are essentially two separate issues: 1) Permanent allocation of names and numbers 2) Interoperability standards and rights allowing us to link names and numbers to service contracts. Once these issues are regulated in a consumer/citizen friendly way (like they did with phone numbers in the UK), governments could provide some sort of default service on top of it, but in my view this is not the most important part.
mulmen 3y ago
The United States already has that. It’s called the United States Postal Service.
- ajdude 3y ago
  I tried searching around to see if USPS offered hosting an email address in the same way I can have mail delivered to a physical address and I was unable to find it. Can you provide a link?
  - mulmen 3y ago
    USPS provides postal mail to all citizens. All government business can be conducted through the mail. If the government provides email should they also provide phone, fax, and chat services?
PedroBatista 3y ago
Some have an obligatory and officially free email account for you... to receive notifications.. to pay taxes.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
I really don't understand how people think government issues services have more privacy, when in reality it is the exact opposite. It didn't even take NSA leaks to know that government privacy violations are lot more both in terms of quantity and the impact. I would never use a government email if it is tied my real self. At least in my country I know for a fact that data which should be legally private is used by political party plans and by the police.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  Most people don't have anything to hide from the government.
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    After observing how quickly Texas turned women's healthcare into criminal activity, I'm inclined to disagree.
- freetanga 3y ago
  I don’t trust them with privacy. But I don’t trust FAANG with that either. But I do freak out about loosing my domain name where my email is hosted, or access to an iCloud / gmail account that a lot of services are anchored about. Two months ago LinkedIn did not like me changing my 2FA client, and locked me out for a month. I have over 5.000 contacts and was chasing a few leads to change jobs. I can tell you is cold outside. Nobody provides support. I had to leverage a friend who knew someone at LinkedIn to sort it out. I hear being locked out of Google, MS and Meta is also bad. I have an .ac account for life that is my “last resort” recovery, but having a government provided email for secure recovery purposes would feel reassuring.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    > I don’t trust FAANG with that either. That's fine. But they NEED to ban people using their service from spam else they would dominate. That is what people don't understand. > but having a government provided email for secure recovery purposes would feel reassuring. It depends on the country and the region, but I have faced issues multiple times with not able to make any progress with the government. It happened in much more important cases like passport, for which if something fails on their system, you are screwed. Nobody provides support in government services as well unless it is required by law, and I have been locked out of government services. In countries like China, you could be locked out of government service if your credit score is low. In Sweden you could be locked out of it if you don't allow unions.
Almondsetat 3y ago
I agree. You shoukd have unlimited inbound and limited outbound emails between citizen accounts and a 10 email limit for outside addresses. This way you can sign up to a third party email service and use your permanent and guaranteed government one as a recovery address
- Avamander 3y ago
  Outbound mail comes with heavy problems with abuse. The government can't easily filter it out either (literally "free speech").
  - Almondsetat 3y ago
    "limited" might mean 50-100 emails per day or even less
    - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      Does anyone send 50+ personal emails a day? If it takes 5 minutes to write each one, that's over 4 hours doing nothing but composing emails!? Maybe if you're sending party invitations or something? But that's got to be once or twice a year, surely.
      - Almondsetat 3y ago
        I didn't say personal, I said between national email addresses, which might include your government services and institutions
cogman10 3y ago
Remember when the US gov did that with a number? The SSN? I don't know how you can make something like this "easy to recover" without introducing giant security problems.
- lesuorac 3y ago
  Yeah it was so much better keeping a book of letters from creditors that you showed to any future creditor to show trustworthy-ness. Whatever mess you think SSNs have caused by their unintended use outweighs the previous system. The simple test for that is, why do people use SSNs as it's not legally required for anything but USG interactions.
  - briandear 3y ago
    Because companies require them.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - plagiarist 3y ago
    All that test confirms is that when every company requires them to do business, one can no longer accomplish anything financial without submitting an SSN to a third party. I guess one could choose to only ever be self-employed, take no loans, and use Mattress Bank.
    - grepfru_it 3y ago
      The purpose of an LLC/Corporation (the Company) is to provide a corporate veil from the managing directors. In such situation, an SSN is not required, but most businesses will then require the Company's Tax Identification Number (TIN) which effectively provides the same identification value as an SSN. Going down that route, the Company itself can take loans and transact with both domestic and international banks.
  - MereInterest 3y ago
    > The simple test for that is, why do people use SSNs as it's not legally required for anything but USG interactions. Because if I want to open a bank account, rent an apartment, or get a mortgage, the other party requires me to give them my SSN, on the assumption that it is a valid unique key for tracking debt payment reliability. It doesn’t matter that the SSN is only legally required for interactions with the US government. When housing is a human necessity, and all sources of housing require a SSN, then using a SSN is not a choice from which one can infer preferences.
b112 3y ago
A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. The era of Pii as a commodity is coming to a close. The writing is on the wall for this. Once that happens, free email will vanish. Poof. Gone. So will many other "free" online things. This period of most people getting free email is really quite short historically. A decade. (Many people used to get email addresses from their ISP, which were part of their paid plan) I wonder what will happen when gmail goes paid. It's going to happen, and I expect so regionally (eg, not the EU zone or some such) within 5 years. A lot of people depend upon said free email, and as much as I dislike Google, they have absolutely zero obligation to give anything away. They've spent the last few years moving classes of accounts to paid. They've been closing down accounts which seem dormant. Soon... a year maybe?, I think we'll see some sort of precursor change. A reduction of storage for free accounts, or number of emails you can send, or something.
- briandear 3y ago
  How poor are people that a low cost email service is too expensive? $5 a month for Europeans or Americans would be nothing. Think how much poor people spend on stamps.
  - sp332 3y ago
    Poor enough that they don’t have a bank account to pay for the email service.
    - ejb999 3y ago
      and yet we assume they are wealthy enough to own a mobile phone and/or computer/tablet to access that email.
      - sp332 3y ago
        Public libraries https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 Subsidised phones and internet access https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline-consumers
judge2020 3y ago
You'd still need to be able to block these addresses or at least have a reputation system for them, otherwise telemarketers would just tank their own reputation for some sales, or people would pay the homeless to sign up and let them send spam via their digital inbox.
- Aardwolf 3y ago
  Make it cost a few cents to send a mail with it, just like stamps of physical mail. It's mostly intended for receiving anyway.
  - airstrike 3y ago
    That's the truth, really. Email should cost [$0.02] or some similar value. You'd solve spam overnight.
    - ubertaco 3y ago
      Yeah, just like how physical mail works. Nobody ever has to deal with spam in their physical mailbox. (/s) That just becomes marketing budget for spammers (which is to say, those for whom email is a component of a revenue stream), and a layer of cost friction for everyone else — meaning that you only really reduce the percentage of email that's actually sincere, non-"hustle"-driven communication.
      - plagiarist 3y ago
        I get less junk mail than junk email. The ratio of legitimate correspondence to junk seems way better as well, or do I have to take the measurement from after the spam filter?
    - rixthefox 3y ago
      I disagree. I don't believe that would solve spam you would just force the spammers to use much more aggressive tactics. If you introduce a fee to email you're only hurting the people who actively communicate back and forth via email as a primary method. Mailing lists anyone? Spammers will take your $0.02 fee per email as an operational expense. Most spam is not sent by the spammers themselves from their own servers but are instead relayed through a third party who handles the delivery part on their behalf who are paid money to run these spam campaigns through their servers instead anyways so they are already paying a fee, this is just an extra cost on top of what they are already paying to do it.
j-bos 3y ago
I mean, iirc in the USA the postal service is a consitutionally mandated service. So this could be (legally) done "overnight" simply by defining electronic mail sevice as a form of postal service. Plus that would be an email service subject to the privacy protections of the USPS.
- briandear 3y ago
  USPS “privacy?” Lol. https://epic.org/postal-service-surveillance-program-targeted-in-epic-lawsuit-exceeded-legal-authority-inspector-general-finds/ https://epic.org/postal-service-surveillance-program-targete...
  - j-bos 3y ago
    Agreed. Though to be clear, I meant legal right to privacy, not necessarily in practice. The USPS cannot legally open mail without a warrant, whereas any LEO can legally just ask google for access to your emails and google can legally just give it to them.
rafaelrc 3y ago
> A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack of privacy. Just like a "free" government option?
- ajdude 3y ago
  A crucial difference being that the government option is publicly funded and ideally does not have an incentive to sell their users' souls in exchange for shareholder profits.
briandear 3y ago
I definitely don’t like government being involved with that. Because it would evolve into “you must use your official government provided email address for <whatever>.” And once that address gets out there, you’ll be spammed your entire life because companies and governments and credit bureaus and other potentially annoying actors would know that’s “your” email address. Hard pass.
ekianjo 3y ago
Government is the entity I trust the least with my communication. No thanks.

benbristow 3y ago

Ah yes, a government owned email service, what could go wrong?

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Nothing? It can exist as a utility alongside other email services.
- iAMkenough 3y ago
  Nothing can go wrong? In that case, the government should create a public social network as a utility alongside other social media services too.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Sure, although I think the utility of a communications network capable of receiving and sending documents within a country is very well proven to be a benefit to society, so any comparison to something less battle tested seems unnecessary. It makes no sense that in the physical world, we entrust government with identity verification and transmitting correspondence, but that trust is somehow lost in the digital world.
    - iAMkenough 3y ago
      I think the utility of a social communications network capable of receiving and sending updates within a country is a very well proven benefit to society, so any attempt to draw a line between email and social updates seems unnecessary. Each US citizen deserves access to a public network to express their First Amendment right without moderation.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        > Each US citizen deserves access to a public network to express their First Amendment right without moderation. Sure, make access to the internet an inalienable right also, but web hosting and domains are cheap enough that that should suffice. The network is the internet, and if people want to visit your website to see what you are saying, they can.
xorcist 3y ago
Several countries have them. Maybe ask them? The reality is that it is about as exciting as getting your paper postal mail delivered in your physical mailbox.
tsimionescu 3y ago
Well, the government owned physical mail service worked pretty well for a few centuries, so... Not much? Now, of course, you shouldn't be organizing a criminal conspiracy or in general much anti-government protests over the mail or government-downed email. But the majority of communication is quite benign, and so having a government email for the 80% use case (bills, party invites, holiday wishes, etc) would be great. You can use a separate service for your more sensitive communication.

stbenjam 3y ago

This would probably work in a lot of European countries or places with high levels of government trust. I could see the German post office for example offering something like this and getting wide acceptance. You’ll have a lot of distrustful Americans commenting how terrible this idea is and the government can’t be trusted. They’d rather get it from a corporation and be subjected to unlimited surveillance capitalism and manipulation.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago
"Think about the children" is pretty effective in Europe. They don't require to violate privacy when they could just make a law with popular support. They are pushing for all the messaging apps to provide unencrypted data to government.[1] [1]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-europe-as-france-and-germany-call-for-decrypt-law/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/encryption-under-fire-in-e...
hadrien01 3y ago
The French post office does offer an email service: https://www.laposte.net/accueil https://www.laposte.net/accueil
- anticensor 3y ago
  Can it communicate with outside email? Some countries have a similar service that cannot communicate with outside email.
  - seszett 3y ago
    It's just a regular email provider. I'm not sure I would trust it to keep working forever, but for the last 15 years or so it's been fine.
judge2020 3y ago
How does anyone have trust in their government besides to provide basic services? Every single government is hellbent on mass surveillance, and the EU is currently leading the way, not the US: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-back-web-security-12-years https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/11/article-45-will-roll-b...

chris-orgmenta 3y ago

> - Self hosting is a bit elitist - not for the masses. Is it? Most people, including nomads & unhoused, seem to have smartphones these days (at risk of theft, but arguably easily replaceable). And 4/5G/PublicWifi connectivity in urban areas is so saturated. I wonder, is it reasonable for me to want government investment and legislation (but no other state interference) into some open source server project that we can run on our phones for this? (heck, give us mesh network functionality too while you're at it). And am I reasonable in my (left-leaning thought) that, like sexual health consumables, mobile phones should be subsidised by tax revenue, along with other necessities/'empowering tools'?

harshitaneja 3y ago
As a nomad, and someone who does run a self hosted mail server for fun, I don't think that's such a good idea. As mentioned, phones can be stolen or broken or just off. Do I want to increase dependencies on phone further by it being the primary store for all my mails as well? Each platform, which is not using TOTP MFA would still depend on email OTPs and so with a broken phone one completely loses access. With TOTPs atleast I get to save a few recovery codes. The cost of losing a phone would mean losing all that data as well. Now, one could say we could and should keep backups. Then, comes the cost of losing access to new mails while the phone is incapicitated. Then, even setting up of email server on a phone with dynamic IP is a whole can of worms in itself and let's go with the easiest solution of using a VPN. So, now we need a VPN, a backup solution and a device to quickly accept emails when the primary device is down. Aren't we just building remote mail servers now? I do have a cloud instance serving my own email but do we expect most users to handle the infra? So now for making it easier for everyone and amortizing the costs let's start offering a solution where multiple people can run email accounts in a single server. Now we have gmail and other providers.
- chris-orgmenta 3y ago
  I suppose I haven't been fully compelled by any of these replies (but I don't have anything compelling in return). Sorry, my lack of knowledge is the failure here (Dunning Kruger effect: I don't see why dynamic IPs / mac addresses / OTP / VPN / encryption are real insurmountable issues here) Also nomadic, also in tech - And I would happily run a mail server on my phone, sacrifice thickness of phone for the extra necessary battery life, and keep a spare phone somewhere for quick restore/swap (I have a spare old android I keep in case I break my current one, which I can keep at a friend's place, an Airbnb or a subscription locker / safe. What's the alternative being proposed though, Google et al? Or a home server (I have no home)? Or still free market, but providers are smaller businesses that are more heavily legislated and are watched over by the state to ensure our data is safe? I'm just not sure 'where' my data+computing should be, other than right next to me in my pocket (but then where do my backups go?). Sorry for the appalling and directionless writing, it's just that everything just seems to circle back to the solution being: *'two small portable battery operated wireless devices that we have control of and the big providers do not have access to; keep one of them on our person and one in another safe place for DR purposes.'*

tambre 3y ago

Estonia has personalidentificationcode@eesti.ee and registrycode@eesti.ee, which you are supposed to set up to forward to your actual email aadress. Unfortunately these are restricted for use by governmental agencies for important official notifications (e.g. you're being conscripted, your marital status changed, something has changed in regard to a property you own). [0] You could create a public alias of the form firstname.lastname.n@eesti.ee, but creation of those was ended in 2018 and they were shutdown in November 2023. [1] [0] https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-notification-service-of-eestiee https://www.eesti.ee/en/using-the-state-portal/terms-of-noti... [1] https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias

thaumasiotes 3y ago
> Unfortunately these are restricted for use by governmental agencies for important official notifications (e.g. you're being conscripted, your marital status changed, something has changed in regard to a property you own). When your marital status changes, isn't that a notification that goes from you to the government, and not the other way around?
- emmet 3y ago
  Your tax codes aren’t going to update the minute you say your vows. Someone needs to do that on the other side and let you know when it’s been processed.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    Why? Does anything change after it's been processed? What are you going to do differently at that point?
    - mgbmtl 3y ago
      I guess it depends if the government recognizes the marriage date that is declared, or the date that they process it (if the marriage was not in front of an official). Divorce date can be pretty random, since it's rarely done live by a judge/official.

regularfry 3y ago

In practical terms the government-issued option would be provided by a corporate player. Option 4 is option 3.

fauigerzigerk 3y ago

I think there are more effective ways for governments to intervene. There are essentially two separate issues: 1) Permanent allocation of names and numbers 2) Interoperability standards and rights allowing us to link names and numbers to service contracts. Once these issues are regulated in a consumer/citizen friendly way (like they did with phone numbers in the UK), governments could provide some sort of default service on top of it, but in my view this is not the most important part.

mulmen 3y ago

The United States already has that. It’s called the United States Postal Service.

ajdude 3y ago
I tried searching around to see if USPS offered hosting an email address in the same way I can have mail delivered to a physical address and I was unable to find it. Can you provide a link?
- mulmen 3y ago
  USPS provides postal mail to all citizens. All government business can be conducted through the mail. If the government provides email should they also provide phone, fax, and chat services?

PedroBatista 3y ago

Some have an obligatory and officially free email account for you... to receive notifications.. to pay taxes.

YetAnotherNick 3y ago

I really don't understand how people think government issues services have more privacy, when in reality it is the exact opposite. It didn't even take NSA leaks to know that government privacy violations are lot more both in terms of quantity and the impact. I would never use a government email if it is tied my real self. At least in my country I know for a fact that data which should be legally private is used by political party plans and by the police.

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
Most people don't have anything to hide from the government.
- plagiarist 3y ago
  After observing how quickly Texas turned women's healthcare into criminal activity, I'm inclined to disagree.
freetanga 3y ago
I don’t trust them with privacy. But I don’t trust FAANG with that either. But I do freak out about loosing my domain name where my email is hosted, or access to an iCloud / gmail account that a lot of services are anchored about. Two months ago LinkedIn did not like me changing my 2FA client, and locked me out for a month. I have over 5.000 contacts and was chasing a few leads to change jobs. I can tell you is cold outside. Nobody provides support. I had to leverage a friend who knew someone at LinkedIn to sort it out. I hear being locked out of Google, MS and Meta is also bad. I have an .ac account for life that is my “last resort” recovery, but having a government provided email for secure recovery purposes would feel reassuring.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  > I don’t trust FAANG with that either. That's fine. But they NEED to ban people using their service from spam else they would dominate. That is what people don't understand. > but having a government provided email for secure recovery purposes would feel reassuring. It depends on the country and the region, but I have faced issues multiple times with not able to make any progress with the government. It happened in much more important cases like passport, for which if something fails on their system, you are screwed. Nobody provides support in government services as well unless it is required by law, and I have been locked out of government services. In countries like China, you could be locked out of government service if your credit score is low. In Sweden you could be locked out of it if you don't allow unions.

Almondsetat 3y ago

I agree. You shoukd have unlimited inbound and limited outbound emails between citizen accounts and a 10 email limit for outside addresses. This way you can sign up to a third party email service and use your permanent and guaranteed government one as a recovery address

Avamander 3y ago
Outbound mail comes with heavy problems with abuse. The government can't easily filter it out either (literally "free speech").
- Almondsetat 3y ago
  "limited" might mean 50-100 emails per day or even less
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    Does anyone send 50+ personal emails a day? If it takes 5 minutes to write each one, that's over 4 hours doing nothing but composing emails!? Maybe if you're sending party invitations or something? But that's got to be once or twice a year, surely.
    - Almondsetat 3y ago
      I didn't say personal, I said between national email addresses, which might include your government services and institutions

cogman10 3y ago

Remember when the US gov did that with a number? The SSN? I don't know how you can make something like this "easy to recover" without introducing giant security problems.

lesuorac 3y ago
Yeah it was so much better keeping a book of letters from creditors that you showed to any future creditor to show trustworthy-ness. Whatever mess you think SSNs have caused by their unintended use outweighs the previous system. The simple test for that is, why do people use SSNs as it's not legally required for anything but USG interactions.
- briandear 3y ago
  Because companies require them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- plagiarist 3y ago
  All that test confirms is that when every company requires them to do business, one can no longer accomplish anything financial without submitting an SSN to a third party. I guess one could choose to only ever be self-employed, take no loans, and use Mattress Bank.
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    The purpose of an LLC/Corporation (the Company) is to provide a corporate veil from the managing directors. In such situation, an SSN is not required, but most businesses will then require the Company's Tax Identification Number (TIN) which effectively provides the same identification value as an SSN. Going down that route, the Company itself can take loans and transact with both domestic and international banks.
- MereInterest 3y ago
  > The simple test for that is, why do people use SSNs as it's not legally required for anything but USG interactions. Because if I want to open a bank account, rent an apartment, or get a mortgage, the other party requires me to give them my SSN, on the assumption that it is a valid unique key for tracking debt payment reliability. It doesn’t matter that the SSN is only legally required for interactions with the US government. When housing is a human necessity, and all sources of housing require a SSN, then using a SSN is not a choice from which one can infer preferences.

b112 3y ago

A paid-for option (proton, tutta,…) would be cataloged as elitist. People perceive email as free. The era of Pii as a commodity is coming to a close. The writing is on the wall for this. Once that happens, free email will vanish. Poof. Gone. So will many other "free" online things. This period of most people getting free email is really quite short historically. A decade. (Many people used to get email addresses from their ISP, which were part of their paid plan) I wonder what will happen when gmail goes paid. It's going to happen, and I expect so regionally (eg, not the EU zone or some such) within 5 years. A lot of people depend upon said free email, and as much as I dislike Google, they have absolutely zero obligation to give anything away. They've spent the last few years moving classes of accounts to paid. They've been closing down accounts which seem dormant. Soon... a year maybe?, I think we'll see some sort of precursor change. A reduction of storage for free accounts, or number of emails you can send, or something.

briandear 3y ago
How poor are people that a low cost email service is too expensive? $5 a month for Europeans or Americans would be nothing. Think how much poor people spend on stamps.
- sp332 3y ago
  Poor enough that they don’t have a bank account to pay for the email service.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    and yet we assume they are wealthy enough to own a mobile phone and/or computer/tablet to access that email.
    - sp332 3y ago
      Public libraries https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 Subsidised phones and internet access https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline-consumers https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline-consumers

judge2020 3y ago

You'd still need to be able to block these addresses or at least have a reputation system for them, otherwise telemarketers would just tank their own reputation for some sales, or people would pay the homeless to sign up and let them send spam via their digital inbox.

Aardwolf 3y ago
Make it cost a few cents to send a mail with it, just like stamps of physical mail. It's mostly intended for receiving anyway.
- airstrike 3y ago
  That's the truth, really. Email should cost [$0.02] or some similar value. You'd solve spam overnight.
  - ubertaco 3y ago
    Yeah, just like how physical mail works. Nobody ever has to deal with spam in their physical mailbox. (/s) That just becomes marketing budget for spammers (which is to say, those for whom email is a component of a revenue stream), and a layer of cost friction for everyone else — meaning that you only really reduce the percentage of email that's actually sincere, non-"hustle"-driven communication.
    - plagiarist 3y ago
      I get less junk mail than junk email. The ratio of legitimate correspondence to junk seems way better as well, or do I have to take the measurement from after the spam filter?
  - rixthefox 3y ago
    I disagree. I don't believe that would solve spam you would just force the spammers to use much more aggressive tactics. If you introduce a fee to email you're only hurting the people who actively communicate back and forth via email as a primary method. Mailing lists anyone? Spammers will take your $0.02 fee per email as an operational expense. Most spam is not sent by the spammers themselves from their own servers but are instead relayed through a third party who handles the delivery part on their behalf who are paid money to run these spam campaigns through their servers instead anyways so they are already paying a fee, this is just an extra cost on top of what they are already paying to do it.

j-bos 3y ago

I mean, iirc in the USA the postal service is a consitutionally mandated service. So this could be (legally) done "overnight" simply by defining electronic mail sevice as a form of postal service. Plus that would be an email service subject to the privacy protections of the USPS.

briandear 3y ago
USPS “privacy?” Lol. https://epic.org/postal-service-surveillance-program-targeted-in-epic-lawsuit-exceeded-legal-authority-inspector-general-finds/ https://epic.org/postal-service-surveillance-program-targete...
- j-bos 3y ago
  Agreed. Though to be clear, I meant legal right to privacy, not necessarily in practice. The USPS cannot legally open mail without a warrant, whereas any LEO can legally just ask google for access to your emails and google can legally just give it to them.

rafaelrc 3y ago

> A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack of privacy. Just like a "free" government option?

ajdude 3y ago
A crucial difference being that the government option is publicly funded and ideally does not have an incentive to sell their users' souls in exchange for shareholder profits.

briandear 3y ago

I definitely don’t like government being involved with that. Because it would evolve into “you must use your official government provided email address for <whatever>.” And once that address gets out there, you’ll be spammed your entire life because companies and governments and credit bureaus and other potentially annoying actors would know that’s “your” email address. Hard pass.

ekianjo 3y ago

Government is the entity I trust the least with my communication. No thanks.