Ask HN: Why there's no email address portability like with phone numbers?
Phone number portability has been standard worldwide for years, allowing us to switch carriers while keeping our numbers. Yet email addresses, which have become more important than phone numbers over the last 20 years or so, lack any similar portability mechanism.
If you've used a @gmail.com or @yahoo.com address for years, you're essentially locked into that provider. Changing means updating countless accounts and risking missed communications. Often there's even no way to update the accounts.
Are there any initiatives or technical proposals for implementing email portability that you're aware of? Given the EU's experience with digital regulations, could they pioneer email portability regulations to reduce vendor lock-in? If it's been just a regulatory oversight, is there a way to initiate this regulation by creating and signing a petition or something like that?
Edit: I see that some commenters are focused on the technical aspects and how the email protocols work currently. Technical aspects were not the reason for my question. The reason is to know whether such initiatives exist. The goal is to transfer the power from the corporation is to the people via government regulations. It's harmful when a decision as simple as creating an email address on a mailbox with a promised 1 GB of storage 20 years ago keeps you dependent on that single provider essentially forever because the circumstances changed and email became the primary means of identification.
I realise that it's not what you want to hear, but it already exists in multiple ways:
- Use your own domain
- Tell GMail to forward all your emails somewhere else
- You can even allow e.g. Yahoo to send emails on behalf of e.g. your GMail address
It seems to me that your frustration comes from one single problem you have, that you mentioned in a comment:
> I still haven't managed to move everything away from my old gmail because sometimes it's impossible without recreating some accounts from scratch.
The emails sent by those accounts to your GMail address can be automatically forwarded to your personal domain, so this is not a problem. Therefore I am guessing that your frustration is that you still have to use your @gmail.com as a username on those websites.
And this is not an email problem at all: it's just those websites preventing you from changing your id (/username).
At the end of the day, the perfect solution to this problem is to have your own domain. Those of us who "screwed up" by not doing it 20 years ago have to deal with it (which is honestly not a very big deal), and we should teach the new generations that they should really have their own domain :-).
It took me about a year to move to my own domain, but it was a great opportunity to clean up 20 years worth of unused accounts, so a net positive I think.
I’ve kept my @gmail address as a backup, though I only check it about once a week now. Plus, I’m free to use it for any new random accounts I don't really care.
Because there is no real demand, barely any benefit, but many problems it would bring.
First it would need a new standard which decouples the domain-part from it's DNS and allow senders to find their target-server independent of the domain-part. Which means, there has to be someone who maintains a list of all valid decoupled mail-addresses. This would be a goldmine for spam. And you would need to adapt all software using mail, to support it. This could take a decade or longer to execute.
Second, this solution has to work even when the domain itself doesn't exist anymore, has to be synced with the official mail-server, which also means any new domain-owners mail-servers. You basically wouldn't have full control over your own systems anymore on the user-part, and have an additional external liability which could harm you service.
And third: Domains and usernames are valuable property, unlike phone numbers. There is serious money in this game, and regular lawsuits over who has the right to own a name. And this would poison the system and open door for abuse and even more lawsuits.
At the end, the little benefit is uncomparable to the problems it would bring.
You could also compare email addresses to snail mail. I think email addresses have about the same level of portability as postal addresses.
- Postal addresses are also used as a means of communication/verification (you can present a bill addressed to you when voting, etc)
- When you move, do you expect to be able to keep using your previous postal addresses? (Perhaps there could be some benefits...)
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As others commenters have pointed out, using your own domain for email seems to be the best solution. It's like using a PO box for postal mail.
> When you move, do you expect to be able to keep using your previous postal addresses? (Perhaps there could be some benefits...)
In some countries you can tell the postal service that you're moving and, for set period of time, they'll forward the mail addressed to you from your old postal address to your new one. It's very useful for catching all those places you didn't remember to update your address for when moving.
You can do the same with email by setting up an forwarding rule on your old email address so that it forwards on any emails it recieves to your new email address.
Yes, that's why I said email and snail mail portability are about the same.
OP's question was about portability like phone numbers where you can keep using your old phone number indefinitely after "moving" to a new provider.
That's an interesting juxtaposition. I think the core difference here is still that home address is somewhat bound to a physical location; you could have a central registry which maps the old address to the new and carry them that way but that seems awfully impractical. On the other hand, with digital services such as email a comparatively simple regulation could solve it.
Of course, this might be the wrong thing to think about an email as a form of identification. Perhaps we should move to a better system altogether at least what is related to addressing.
Another way to look at is: email domains are like international country codes.
For example, you can't port a US number to a Korean number.
I'm sure it's technically feasible to port international phone numbers, but I don't think it will happen. Perhaps email portability is similar in this respect.
I realize there isn't much portability even within an email domain, but it does exist in some forms (maybe like how phone number portability may not be available in all countries):
- Very unique case, but I know a certain Google employee whose email suddenly changed from OLD@gmail.com to NEW@gmail.com in my chat history. A search for NEW@gmail.com results in emails from both addresses (both highlighted), so they are linked somehow. And emails to OLD@gmail.com are still received.
Email is portable. You need to use your own domain. If you use Gmail.com as the domain it isn't reasonable to expect yahoo can serve a Gmail domain. That's not how the internet works. There's a very easy and common solution - buy a domain for $10/yr and use email providers that let you bring your own domain. It is portable by design.
"That's not how internet works" is as powerful an argument as "That's not how GSM works". Buying a domain and setting up a new email address won't help you when you have been using your @gmail.com for the past 20 years and want to stop being dependent on Google.
I have bought my personal domain and started using my email address 8 years ago and I still haven't managed to move everything away from my old gmail because sometimes it's impossible without recreating some accounts from scratch.
What services have you not been able to change your email address for?
I have done the exact same process over the last few years --- moving from Gmail to a my own domain --- and I have found only around 10 services that did not let me change my email address. I view that as a success personally.
I have gone the opposite way. I got my personal domain email before Gmail. Having mail coming into various other places I centralised them by automatically forwarding to a Gmail account. Now Gmail has become the account that gets used! Ah well.
I got my own domain maybe 15 years ago when Google gave out free workspace accounts for personal use.
Saturday marked the second or third year I had to pay for Google workspace because they did an about face and got rid of there for personal use program.
Do I feel duped and resentful? 100% Could I move elsewhere since it’s my own domain? 100% But am I hooked since I like Google’s tools better then anything else out there? 100%
But honestly, I could see the day someone comes out with competition to Google mail, sheets, docs, and calendar that is good enough to convince me to switch. Wouldn’t be that hard and since I own my domain I can do it.
In summation, even if Google totally pulled the rug out from under me, guess it could be worse
It would be like each telcom having its own area code and expecting to be able to move a seven digit suffix from one to another. That’s a closer analogy to how email works.
I second this. If you are using @gmail or @yahoo, you dont own anything; rather, you are renting an address on their server. @gmail.com is Google's property. But if you own your domain, it's your property. You can change the Domain registrars just like you port your phone number.
You could have said the same about using a GSM provider's SIM card back in the day. Yet, now we can easily switch the provider without changing the number.
Not the same thing at all. An email address is a hierarchical construct with different ownership at each level, and a phone number isn’t.
It used to be before government regulations were put in place. I don't care much about the technical feasibility currently. When and if a law is put in place it becomes up to the developers to create a solution.
Ownership isn’t a problem developers can solve, but lawyers will line up for it. After 50 or whatever years there is a lot of calcification around email.
one is the cell phone you got from work, change employer, change phone number. The other is your private cell: it costs more, but it is your number.
If you have your own domain name, then you have email address portability.
I think the combinatorial space [1] of email addresses is
2^336 is a non-trivial number of lines in a lookup table.That’s why hierarchical schemes probably make sense.
Good luck
[1] valid address space is of course smaller.
Because you pay for it
> Are there any initiatives or technical proposals for implementing email portability that you're aware of?
No, nor should there be, not as you are thinking about it.
> regulatory oversight
There is no global regulatory body. The Internet is a loose federation. Even the DNS isn't necessarily sacrosant -- there are alternative DNS roots, the most recent I am aware of is to support ENS.
With that in mind it should be obvious that there isn't a way to make addresses in third-party domains portable. If there were it would be problematic wrt security.
Quite awhile back, there was this effort called ENUM[0] that seems to have withered. My thought is that because phone numbers are portable, via ENUM we can make a sort of canonical email addresses discovery service. This doesn't really solve the problem for you though, and would be itself pretty fraught.
[0] https://circleid.com/posts/enum_mapping_e164_into_dns
ENUM is alive and well, and used in telecom, it's just not public for most numbering plans. If you need to know the carrier of a number for call routing, there's a chance you'll use ENUM under the hood.
To the OP. Phone number portability was a plausible demand, because a) it already existed in some form for toll free numbers and other specialty numbers, and b) the number of telephone carriers subject to portability is generally quite small, so there's not a lot of regulatory reach required. OTOH, there are thousands of email providers, and forcing them all to provide forwarding of some sort would be a massive undertaking.
It might not be pleasant to change your email address... on the other hand, email is probably slowly dying, so it might not be a big deal in another 20 years. :P
Interesting. What do you think will replace email in 20 years as a means of identification? I could imagine forced log ins via corporate authorization servers but that would defeat the purpose of having custom domain and email.
Phone numbers/sim IDs maybe. Not cause people use them for phone calls, but because more people have an active phone line (or data line which gets a phone number anyway), than email, especially in countries where computers never made it to everyone's homes before smartphones took over.
I think at best you could mandate forwarding, but that is numerous issues.