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.
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?
I wouldn't be sending anything through my government email that I would sent through the post mail. I would be cautious about sending anything through email, as it probably ends up in gmail unencrypted as it is, and is transmitted in the open through multiple relays.
But, we also know that Google, Yahoo, and other _do_ scan all your email. I'm not sure why you feel any safer with a huge corporation that has no oversight.
A huge corporation with no oversight can, at worst, terminate my account unilaterally. Maybe they want to sue me, but that will go to a neutral arbiter (the courts).
A government run email platform can, at worst, arrest me or send a SWAT team to my house.
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.
...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.")
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?
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.
I guess there should be a provision against gov services making it mandatory for people to use the gov provided email.
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.
https://news.err.ee/1608966110/ria-ends-support-for-eesti-ee...
> 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.
If someone's abusing the privilege, then there can be restrictions added.
Outbox restrictions: because otherwise every citizen who gets a bit of malware on one of their devices will start sending spam and get (temporarily) restricted, and the whole point is to have a reliable address that you know the citizen cannot lose access to. Also because it would be real weird if you could send messages to addresses that cannot reply to you because of the inbox whitelist.
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.
Digital technology has given those in power a level of insight and control over people's lives that was previously unheard of in human history. That kind of capability is too tempting and dangerous.
We desperately need a way to separate key digital infrastructure away from corporate or government interests. Putting email in the hands of the government would further diminish what little digital rights we have left.
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.
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.
I do volunteer technical work with some of our homeless shelters. Having access to email is critical. Without it, they have no access to a whole host of government services they need. They don't have their own computer, so they are relying on email as their document storage.
Gmail and other 3rd party email providers constantly cause issues for them. Their login is often tied to a cell phone which gets broken, stolen, and replaced often. Or they cycle through numbers since their service is constantly interrupted due to payment issues. They rarely have any way to gain access back to their email, and their access to many important services is lost.
At least with the post office, there is a physical place you can go to, and have multiple ways to prove your identity and continue to get access to your email, which like I said, is a requirement and lifeline for this population.