Should There Be Mandatory Email Address Portability?
from the nope dept
Apparently someone has filed a petition with the FCC to try to have the FCC require email address portability. The idea is that, if you were to change email providers, the old provider would be required to forward your email to a new account. If you go to the link above, Declan McCullough points out seven reasons why it's dumb to mandate this (in part because this is way outside the FCC's scope of authority). However, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea for email providers to offer that service themselves as a differentiator. In the meantime, this doesn't seem like much of a problem for most people. Either they have their own domains or they do a pretty good job of informing anyone who matters whenever they change email addresses.
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Filed Under: email, fcc, portability
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2 other problems
Also, would it be required for employers? My last job was at a bank, whenever someone left we forwarded that person's e-mail to their replacement. I would be irate if I emailed my personal banker, and it turns out they had been fired a week before then they had all my account numbers right there in front of them.
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There are already 3rd-party providers that provide "lifetine" email addresses. And you can have these forwarded to any email addresss, such as one that is created on a provider.
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Duh.
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Re:
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God, get a third party email
As others have said, get a third party email. It's real simple. I haven't used an ISP's email ever. And I've been online since 1994.
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Re: God, get a third party email
>Arguing that you should be able to keep your email after moving to a new ISP is
> like arguing you should be able to keep your same address after moving to a
> new house. Complete nonsense.
Actually - you brush up against what "should be" an industry practice:
Like the United States Post Office, someone who moves should be allowed to ELECT to have their mail forwarded for a set amount of time. Since it does consume resources at the "old" address/service, it wouldn't be in perpetuity, but would go far in being a courtesy service. Similarly, if it is elective, then someone changing email accounts due to spam-overload doesn't have to worry about the spam being forwarded.
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E-Mail Stupidity
I'm saying that this person doesn't understand that most of the time you switch your E-Mail to get away from spam and scams.
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NO! NO! NO! NO!
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There are better ways
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duh
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better idea
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a good ISP..
Should an ISP be forced to do that? No.
Should they do that to show they've got integrity? Absolutely.
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Too many alternatives to warrant gov interference
Besides, most people have multiple means of contacting another (IM, blog, message boards, phone, postal mail, walking to their house, via common friend, etc)
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GMail - problem solved
Just go get a GMail account. It is fast, easy, free, huge storage, they have extensions to turn it into a virtual online hard drive for storing things.
You can access it anywhere you have a web browser.
Spam filters on it work REALLY well.
You can have it send emails to your Outlook or Outlook Express with a few simple adjustments - And they walk you through it, so it even helps the PEBKAC crew get it done.
Simple - never have to drop the 500 emails of "Hi, my email address has changed to: " junk again!
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Re: GMail - problem solved
But until then, enjoy the services of the borg.
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But a smart ISP might offer to forward mail for 60 days for $20.00.
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So in short, the person who filed this complaint is an idiot.
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Will NEVER happen..
Now mind you I wasnt running an open relay, these are their legitimate emails that AT&T is somehow determining are spam. They are saying as high as 90+% of the email being forwarded was spam. My in-laws got on average 100 emails a day. Big deal. I think man in the middle email filtering is akin to Cliff Claven the postal carrier throwing out all bulk postage email because it could be junk mail, not always an accurate thing, and most spam filtering is subject to the same possible errors.
So if email portability happened all the isp's would likely go the way of AT&T and just blockade servers that forwarded 'ported' email accounts that had a high spam ratio(still dont know what AT&T does to monitor the spammyness of an email).
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Re: Will NEVER happen..
Makes much more sense to do it that way....
Chris.
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Can be a pain in the rump!
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Email Portability
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Re:
But again, 9 times out of time (maybe 7/10) the customer won't understand this and demand help.
I know this from personal experience (working at an ISP for 9+ years).
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Even *paid* accounts can die...
They were bought over by UK2.net, and announced that all payments in future had to be through a physical cheque or postal order, "with a note attached saying which account was being renewed", posted to a London address. (!!!)
They had no means of accepting electronic payments. I'm registered disabled and have no current cheque book. I certainly have no intention of crossing town to stand in a long queue to buy a postal order, just to keep a company that appears to be circling the drain afloat.
I emailed their support site and explained this. They emailed me back and said that they would, as a "gesture of goodwill", extend my account by two months until they could accept electronic payments. Then they closed all their incoming email addresses, (they never *did* have a 'phone number) emailed a sequence of final demands for a physical payment and a week later closed my account.
That killed off three email addresses I used regularly, and about a dozen I used occasionally. Oh and two-thirds of a box of "calling cards".
Now their website says "There's a sparkling new Another.com under way!" - yeah, right.
I suppose the point of this rant is that even when you *pay* for a long-established account, circumstances can force you to lose it.
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Re:
Right now, there is no way to redirect mail at the MX level. Sure, you could point the MX record at a different server, but the new receiving mail server would have to be informed that it should now accept mail for x domain. Not doing that would create a loop....
And it would forward ALL the mail from x domain to this new server, not just one user. Basically, MX records only affect stuff to the right of the @ sign...
A good discussion of MX records is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MX_record
Chris.
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Yah but...
Given the important of email, I actually think some kind of equivalent to the post office forwarding - 6 months for free - isn't a bad idea.
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Bigfoot
They even allowed you to filter emails to separate accounts... send multiple copies to separate account, pretty much anything you wanted to do with emails, you could...
Then they started to charge for the 'Advanced services'... then they started to limit the free services (such as only X emails will be forwarded...) My old account still forwards correctly to my gmail account... but I nolonger give it out, I just use my gmail for my main account, and my hotmail for my spam account.
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"Also, would it be required for employers?"
I would hope not, since the email address, the domain and the information in the email are owned by the employer, not the employee. But who knows when the feds get involved. Your example of a bank is the perfect reason why this should never happen.
Second:
"c'mon, there are no real overhead, it should be possible to use a protocol to inform about redirects without actually exchanging the whole message. HTTP redirect works nicely for webpages, and EMAIL redirect, aka MX, is implemented at the @host level in the DNS (yep guys, the email service is at the DNS level). The implementation at level of user@ for a specific host could be supported easily"
The devil is in the details. Please explain how you would do this without requiring a re-write of the SMTP RFC's and updates/upgrades to every MTA in the world. And also how you are going to get the whole world to do this at once. I really want to hear how user@ is going to be 'supported easily' at the DNS/MX level.
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And while Gmail/Yahoo/etc accounts may provide more autonomy than ISP accounts they still fall well short of owning your own domain. For something as important as e-mail people should make the effort to retain as much control as possible.
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I solved this 12 years ago...
More expensive than Gmail or another free service, but I have 500gb of space and 12+ years of archived email available, not to mention files, calendaring and other groupware capabilities. And it's all under my control (and only my control).
Chris.
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complain
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