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Comment by e12e | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure how you go from: Unless you have Google Apps for Business (or whatever), there are no vanity domains for gmail; to: email is a broken system?

Gmail.com is certainly broken in the sense that they want to cram 10 billion users into a single domain. It's ridiculous marketing/brand-motivated UX failure.

Since forever most mail services had a few vanity-domains, so people could get first.last@wherever.com. But no, Google doesn't want to provide email, they want to provide "Google Mail".

Apologies for the rant, but I can't stand it when big companies create problems through stupidity.

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I dont believe I said anything about vanity domains, so I dont know what you mean by that.

I meant that email is broken in the sense that when some stranger mistakenly thinks that your email belongs to them, and continues to give it out or sign it up for mailing lists, you have absolutely no recourse. If you have an email address that like mine is easily mistaken for other ones you get incorrectly-addressed personal emails many times a day. There is no way to find the actual intended recipient or get in contact with that person to say "hey you seem to be confusd, stop using my email address". And there is no really good way to filter those emails, since after all they are coming to your correct address. I think this is the kind of problem that's difficult to appreciate unless it happens to you frequently.

The problem with email is that anyone can email you if they have your address.. thats why we have so much spam. I dont know what the solution is, but it would be much better if the recipient had to opt-in to the conversation somehow as well.

> so I dont know what you mean by that.

I believe he means that if tizz.dogg@gmail.com was already taken, Google should offer tizz.dogg@loopyloop.com rather than tizz.dogg1@gmail.com. In fact they shouldn't even show that as an option.

Since Google Is now a domain registrar they could create the new domains on the fly.

Then there wouldn't be namespace collisions.

Indeed. Google/Gmail do two strange things: a) While they support the age old username+whatever@gmail.com in order for users to hand out special addresses to mailinglists etc (eg: user+facebook@gmail.com, user+lkml@facebook.com) -- they don't distinguish on dots in the username (so username == user.name == u.ser.name etc). And b) they don't offer other domains than gmail.com, which leads to strange things like smith1, smith79 etc.

As for there being "no recourse" -- apart from spam, that's just wrong. It's much faster to reply with a "This is not your Smith"-mail, than it is to write a "return to sender" on an envelope. Same thing for getting phone calls from a different timezone etc.

[ed: I do agree that it's a bit more difficult with people that don't know their own address -- still think it should be quicker to reach their contacts via email than via comparable means.]

>> It's much faster to reply with a "This is not your Smith"-mail

Right, and I've sent literally hundreds of those emails. They almost never do any good, because while one person may fix your address in their contacts list, the original person who gave out the faulty address is still out there, unaware that they're giving out bad info. I always ask if the email sender can tell the intended recipient about this when they figure out the right address, but that rarely works. Anyway, I know this is a very specific problem that only affects a small fraction of people, but it's extremely annoying.

I dont really see how allowing other domains would help.. that just shifts the issue to the domain string instead of the user string. I guess it gives people more options. But one of the main benefits of gmail addresses is that it's so common. Everybody knows it, so nobody ever misspells the 'gmail' part at least.

But isn't this true about phone numbers, addresses, and other things that have been around for longer than email?

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