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Comment by davb | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps the solution is for libraries or local authorities to setup their own email providers. An email address “for life” with your library card, with the necessary support and in-person reset verification that their patrons need. I’m not suggesting this would be an easy or inexpensive undertaking, but maybe that’s just the next step in service evolution for a public information service like a library group.

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i absolutely think this is the next step. we're at a point now where it's becoming obvious to even a layperson that we really are lacking a lot of agency over our lives, which has been given over to big tech companies to arbitrate. i also think it could be a way away from the monopoly of facebook over our social lives, to have e.g. library servers which run a local instance of mastodon, for local people, to be connected to the actual community they're in. the only way to reverse suppression of small email providers is to make it more common for people to /use/ small email providers - which happens if it's more common for email addresses to be administered by someone you actually, physically know. for that to be the trust relationship with the system administrator, rather than blindly accepting every new privacy policy just because it feels like there's no other option. the more i research this topic, the more this feels like the only sustainable way out of the dystopian hellhole described in her letter.

I'll extend off of your great commentary and suggest that the letter/small correspondence delivery portion of the USPS (not the parcel/package delivery segment) should be collaborating with U.S. libraries to establish more digital infrastructure for citizens; especially those who lack what others might consider the digital basics. This could include free/low cost email, local instances of ActivityPub servers, matrix (or other secure, but open source equivalent) chat services, etc. I understand this would open up many issues, and not an easy fix...but if more and more things are truly becoming more digitized, then government (and government-adjacent) services should not just evolve, but also help the citizenry evolve to take advantage of said services. At that point, i can imagine a scenario where if such a free/low cost email service were available, the likes of google and microsoft could not block digital correspondence since there would be at least some regulatory framework/policy in place to avoid such issues. Again, none of this is easy, but i feel the path forward can still leverage gov. entities - like libraris and USPS - that have greatly helped citizens in the past throughout our history.

Indeed, but this will then going to face the issue of Gmail (et al.) refusing to accept e-mail sent from small providers.

I am sure a another huge vendor like Amazon, facebook, or Microsoft will step in to provide the email services :)

This is where regulations can step in, to require email providers to accept mail from essential service providers.

I will pass on that, no one should be required to accept messages from anyone

How about "required to not mark as spam"?

I am not a fan of regulation in general

But SPAM should be resolved with strict adherence to standards like SPF, DKIM, etc. and where those fail it should be improved

Today many companies, large and small, as well as government agencies, large and small do SPF and DKIM very very very wrong.

Unless we can get this right I fail to see how regulations would do anything other than make things worse

Some of the biggest SPAM abusers are not the small providers but the Large companies like Gmail and Microsoft who do not vet their customers very well

If they are refusing messages, there's no need to bother marking them as spam.

Ah yes, I can see how this even worse situation could easily happen trying to "fix" the previous one...

This isn't necessarily a "from a small provider" but rather "administered by the library."

It could be any email service that allows the librarian-administer to reset the password for an account. If I mess up my exchange email, the helpdesk can verify my identity and reset my password.

I suspect that most going down this approach would find it easier to use a large hosting service that they provision and administer (along with allowing password resets) than to try to have an underfunded library IT staff stand up an arbitrarily large email service and manage all parts of it.

They (libraries) could even set it up using Google Workspace, or any other email service provider like FastMail, Outlook, etc. Maybe companies could add a super inexpensive plan for public service providers like libraries to enable this sort of account for which librarians could do password resets, unlocks, etc. Maybe charge for the # of administrators only?

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