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Comment by freetanga | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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-noti... [1] https://www.eesti.ee/en/closing-alias/closing-alias

> 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?

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.

Why? Does anything change after it's been processed? What are you going to do differently at that point?

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.

The marital example is something I came up with, but not actually sure if that happens as I haven't gotten married myself. But it sounds something like that would exist so you can react to someone faking your identity and registering a fictive marriage with someone in your name.

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.

> Remember when the US gov did that with a number? The SSN?

The problem is that the SSN is treated as a password when it should be treated as username.

Knowing first.last at gmail.com gives you nothing much, security-wise. Knowing I'm 123456789 at ssn.usps.com wouldn't be that much different, though given the limited search space, it would be an easy target for spammers. (Perhaps expanding from nine digits to something bigger (16+, see perhaps ISO/IEC 7812) would be useful, though there'd have to be a lot of work to update systems, even though they're not short of numbers.)

> I don't know how you can make something like this "easy to recover" without introducing giant security problems.

In a similar way for instance that you would recover a lost, stolen, or accidentally destroyed US passport (but presumably cheaper).

I was thinking more along the line of walking to your local Goverment office and validate your ID.

Many countries offer digital IDs to interact with them. And a (cumbersome vs digital but fast Vs traditional government processes) way of unlocking it. It would be just offering a email inbox linked to it.

In Spain we have an Inbox from the DMV for fines, one with the Tax authority, one with local government… these are messaging boards inboxes. The move to a single digital inbox could help streamline many government processes.

Yes, I agree. In fact I'm also Spanish and the solution felt as obvious as it would be in Spain. The reason I suggested the (US) passport analogy was to make it as relatable as possible to the American audience of HN :-)

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.

> 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.

Companies ask for the SSN because its so much more efficient than their previous systems.

They already did debt repayment without SSNs; it's just easier with one. The existence of fraud with a SSN doesn't mean there wasn't fraud without one; and if there was more fraud now then companies would abandon asking for SSNs.

You might not like SSNs but their existence has been a benefit not a detriment to the USA.

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.

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.

Because companies require them.

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.

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-b...

How does anyone have trust in their governments to provide even basic services? Not where I live.

Still, I'd prefer to try and fix it (for various levels of "fixing") than throw the baby with the bathwater. It's an imperfect system but trusting a corporation is no better.

Do you not make the distinction between government and state in your language?

The government usually provide little service, but the state do. The question whether you trust it as a single entity is a bit hard to understand. Do you mean trust that my father gets his pension? Or that my kids get a good education? Or that my neighbor who is a doctor can provide decent health care?

I probably trust some of those more and some less, depending on the circumstance. But basing trust on funding model seems intellectually .. challenging. Would I trust a university teacher more if the employer is not a state university? Would I trust a policeman more if working for a private security company?

Not likely. Trust is based on other factors, including reputation and competence.

In American English, government and state (in the sense you mean it) are synonyms.

Other countries seem to think of the government as "the current ruling party coalition members holding ministerial positions", so it would be inappropriate to refer to say, the driver's license bureau as "the government", but in the US, you'd never limit the sense of government in that way - you'd say something like "the administration" if you wanted to refer to the federal head of state and department heads, but the current federal executive, the US Congress, your local driver's license bureau, your tax assessor, your state environmental agency are all "the government" in the US.

This is something that comes to mind whenever I hear about a local government doing a monoboly-busting effort to provide internet connectivity to their city, county, etc. I know their heart's probably in the right place, but I don't want the government to have a plug in the wall of my home that serves all of my communications and media.

The US is absolutely leading the way, it’s just being done by companies like Ring.

A lot of people really want mass surveillance? Not even kidding. Cultures vary.

Trust in government is more common than not throughout the world, because the government is us. Americans in particular struggle with this concept.

Actually there has been an attempt of a state mandated E-Mail service in Germany called De-Mail.

The idea was to put guarantees like identity, delivery receipts and stuff into an email system, so it can be used for legally binding communication.

However it failed for various reasons (privacy concerns as it purposely had no e2e, usability restrictions, cost, ...)

The French post office does offer an email service: https://www.laposte.net/accueil

Can it communicate with outside email? Some countries have a similar service that cannot communicate with outside email.

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.

"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-e...

Yeah, the Germans have such a great reputation when it comes to trusting government. Many aren’t old enough to remember the fun of the Stasi and the West German equivalent, the BND. And let’s not forget the Nazis with their meticulous tracking and record keeping.

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.

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.

> 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.

Most people don't have anything to hide from the government.

After observing how quickly Texas turned women's healthcare into criminal activity, I'm inclined to disagree.

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.

> This period of most people getting free email is really quite short historically. A decade.

I do agree from a long perspective free email has been somewhat short. But I'm not sure about scoping it to just a decade. It was easy to get a Gmail account in 2004, that's close to 20 years ago. And Gmail wasn't even the first free email host, loads of people used other free email services like Yahoo (1997), Hotmail (1996), Lycos (1997), and others. 1996-2024 is 28 years, close to three decades.

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.

In many cases is the expectation of the service being free…

If someone told you that checking the weather app is .50 usd per query, you probably would try to find a different alternative, as you expect it to be free.

Poor enough that they don’t have a bank account to pay for the email service.

and yet we assume they are wealthy enough to own a mobile phone and/or computer/tablet to access that email.

Public libraries https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32304320 Subsidised phones and internet access https://www.fcc.gov/lifeline-consumers

Contrary to popular belief, most homeless people have cellphones.

well then however they are affording a mobile phone and the monthly service, they can probably figure out how to pay $5/month for email if they don't want to use one of the free options.

People can have an older phone, given free, cast off by people buying the latest-and-greatest, and use public wifi for everything. The phone can literally be free.

This requires no monthly service.

> - 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'?

You can’t realistically host an email server on your phone, which is what is meant. For that to work, your phone would need to be able to be woken up (to handle receiving a message) by arbitrary parties on the internet at any time, which is generally considered undesirable, quite apart from the bother caused by your phone ever being offline (sender’s server will keep retrying every so often for a couple of days, sender will generally be notified of this each time—and note the problem of the sender’s phone-hosted mail server being offline too if that’s what you were doing).

> You can’t realistically host an email server on your phone, which is what is meant. For that to work, your phone would need to be able to be woken up (to handle receiving a message)...

What you have described is normal behavior for a modern wireless device.

Temporary interruptions occur regularly, a reason for which store and forward designs feature in email servers to this day.

The problem to overcome is not temporary disruption but addressing.

The modern wireless device communicates regularly in this way with one trusted, well-known, well-behaving service. That’s very different from allowing anyone in the world to ping your phone and wake it up, at any time.

woken up to contact one of the big cloud notification services, which defeats the point of not using them

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.

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.'*

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.

> A free option provided by a Corporate player will gravitate towards monopolies and lack of privacy.

Just like a "free" government option?

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.

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

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.

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.

That's the truth, really. Email should cost [$0.02] or some similar value. You'd solve spam overnight.

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.

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?

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.

How much is the cost of the third party now compared to how much it would be when there is a 2 cent per email overhead?

I had a look at legit services, Sender will let me do 30k emails at around $15/mo. If I can assume that's representative, I only need the profit multiplied by probability of a sale to beat $0.0005 to make money. If I had to beat $0.02, I would need to increase the odds, perhaps by sending only to interested parties. Or somehow drastically increase my profit margins by 40x without reducing the probability of a sale.

We would simply have far less spam with a per email fee.

> 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?

So don't require a stamp for email sent from one of your contacts, or from a mailing list you're subscribed to. No reason email from everyone in the world needs to be treated equally.

With Twitter being worse than ever while also implementing the paid-for blue check, I'm no longer convinced that nominal costs solve much of anything. Maybe it's a different model (per email vs per account w/ Twitter), but I feel like scammers/phishers would pay the premium.

While extremely idealist and would never happen in practice, I think I'd rather see a provider that enforces KYC-esque requirements and is a closed iMessage-esque system. I took my phone number off my main mobile device due to spam (pretty much everyone I know has an iPhone) and have not looked back since.

If I want privacy, I'll self-host. If I don't care, I'll use the monopoly.

Hum, maybe finally a good use of a distributed, append-only database (like blockchain)?

Reputation ledger where reported spam takes a lot off (say 100 units), sending an email costs little (1 unit), and possibly a way to earn more reputation by not having particular email be reported as spam (1.1 units back after 2 weeks for every sent email).

To enter the system, you need to start with at least 1000 units.

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

Outbound mail comes with heavy problems with abuse. The government can't easily filter it out either (literally "free speech").

"limited" might mean 50-100 emails per day or even less

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.

I didn't say personal, I said between national email addresses, which might include your government services and institutions

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

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.

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

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?

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?

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

Nothing? It can exist as a utility alongside other email services.

Nothing can go wrong? In that case, the government should create a public social network as a utility alongside other social media services too.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

USPS “privacy?” Lol.

https://epic.org/postal-service-surveillance-program-targete...

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.

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