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> Are there any initiatives or technical proposals for implementing email portability that you're aware of? No, nor should there be, not as you are thinking ab

> Are there any initiatives or technical proposals for implementing email portability that you're aware of? No, nor should there be, not as you are thinking about it. > regulatory oversight There is no global regulatory body. The Internet is a loose federation. Even the DNS isn't necessarily sacrosant -- there are alternative DNS roots, the most recent I am aware of is to support ENS. With that in mind it should be obvious that there isn't a way to make addresses in third-party domains portable. If there were it would be problematic wrt security. Quite awhile back, there was this effort called ENUM[0] that seems to have withered. My thought is that because phone numbers are portable, via ENUM we can make a sort of canonical email addresses discovery service. This doesn't really solve the problem for you though, and would be itself pretty fraught. [0] https://circleid.com/posts/enum_mapping_e164_into_dns https://circleid.com/posts/enum_mapping_e164_into_dns

toast0 2y ago
ENUM is alive and well, and used in telecom, it's just not public for most numbering plans. If you need to know the carrier of a number for call routing, there's a chance you'll use ENUM under the hood. To the OP. Phone number portability was a plausible demand, because a) it already existed in some form for toll free numbers and other specialty numbers, and b) the number of telephone carriers subject to portability is generally quite small, so there's not a lot of regulatory reach required. OTOH, there are thousands of email providers, and forcing them all to provide forwarding of some sort would be a massive undertaking. It might not be pleasant to change your email address... on the other hand, email is probably slowly dying, so it might not be a big deal in another 20 years. :P
- pllbnk 2y ago
  Interesting. What do you think will replace email in 20 years as a means of identification? I could imagine forced log ins via corporate authorization servers but that would defeat the purpose of having custom domain and email.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Phone numbers/sim IDs maybe. Not cause people use them for phone calls, but because more people have an active phone line (or data line which gets a phone number anyway), than email, especially in countries where computers never made it to everyone's homes before smartphones took over.

toast0 2y ago

ENUM is alive and well, and used in telecom, it's just not public for most numbering plans. If you need to know the carrier of a number for call routing, there's a chance you'll use ENUM under the hood. To the OP. Phone number portability was a plausible demand, because a) it already existed in some form for toll free numbers and other specialty numbers, and b) the number of telephone carriers subject to portability is generally quite small, so there's not a lot of regulatory reach required. OTOH, there are thousands of email providers, and forcing them all to provide forwarding of some sort would be a massive undertaking. It might not be pleasant to change your email address... on the other hand, email is probably slowly dying, so it might not be a big deal in another 20 years. :P

pllbnk 2y ago
Interesting. What do you think will replace email in 20 years as a means of identification? I could imagine forced log ins via corporate authorization servers but that would defeat the purpose of having custom domain and email.
- toast0 2y ago
  Phone numbers/sim IDs maybe. Not cause people use them for phone calls, but because more people have an active phone line (or data line which gets a phone number anyway), than email, especially in countries where computers never made it to everyone's homes before smartphones took over.