Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

I think this is everywhere. In India, people in the departments, especially the Governments usually ask, "What is your Gmail?" Almost everyone uses Gmail here and it is extremely rare to find their own custom domain.

I'm actually surprised that the Government Departments do not have a service that takes care of these! They will fine Google but almost all of the government email IDs are Gmail.

I was one of those that distributed hundreds if not thousands of Gmail invites when it started. However, since 2010-ish, I left Gmail to be just for Newsletters, and the ones that I'm not serious about. I'm always reminded that a day will come when I will just have no access, lock out and be done with it.

I had used my name's domain and had used the web hosting provided email service and I felt nice using the likes of `webmaster@brajeshwar.com` (early 2000s). Then I got a shorter domain with our family domain and is, now, powered by Google Workspace (with a plan to move to the competitors soon before the yearly plan expires). I had so many domains under the Google Suite free version since its beta. I did upgraded my primary domain to the paid version, when I had few mail delivery issues so I can talk to a person and that was also the time I realize I cannot go back. That was almost/about 10 years ago.

I find it utterly astounding that not a single government has started an email service yet for its citizens, with all the legal protections of actual mail and such.

They wouldn't even need to run it, just create a legal category like "This account is officially registered to X and serves as a legal email account" that companies can apply for if they meet some standards.

First, why would they when they don't need to because private companies already provide it for free?

Second, the government is now on the hook for not just failures and outages but all security and privacy breaches.

So it's basically all risk and no reward. It makes sense governments wouldn't want to touch that.

Private companies provide it for free because they earn money from violating their users' privacy. They have proven incapable of providing a decent email service for free.

Which makes sense; "spend a lot of money providing a service for nothing in return" isn't a great business model.

Sweden has "Min myndighetspost".

It would be interesting to know how many of government agencies use Google email services? Is the email interaction between citizen and state now predominantly in the hands of a foreign third party?

In Netherlands: not just the government, also pretty much every major business and even Universities (Groningen comes to mind). And not just Google, but also Microsoft (Teams, Outlook, etc).

I've often wondered whether that is the real main reason why so little innovation comes out of Europe vs the US: everything of economic, academic and geopolitical importance in Europe is streamed straight to the US and the sender is paying for the service of having valuable information leakable.

Source: Snowden.

Groningen is an outlier in using Google Workspace for email iirc. Most of the Dutch universities I came into contact with (including the one I used to attend) were deep into on-prem Exchange, with some moving to O365.

> almost all of the government email IDs are Gmail.

I think you are mistaken.

Majority of the emails are on government server: https://email.gov.in/

They used to be on 3rd party provider till a few years back (but still never on Gmail).

I was entering my e-mail address on booking.com recently ( format bookingcom@domain.tld ) and it thoughtfully suggested I'd made a typo, didn't I mean bookingcom@gmail.com?

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