Re: potable e-mail, now Trying to do too much (was Re: the introduction problem, etc.)

[Keith Moore <[e-mail]>]

On 5/19/22 19:18, Michael Richardson wrote:

>      > Um, what?  I'm using the same e-mail in the same domain I registered in
>      > 1993 wven though it's gone through a whole lot of different providers
>      > in the past two decades.  Mail domains are extremely portable.
>
> Right. Mail*domains*  are extremely portable.
> Now, explain to me how to [e-mail]  to yahoo or protonmail.com?
> ".forward" used to work, but DMARC policy makes this impossible now.

Well, sure.   If you start out using a non-portable email address, you 
can't change providers while keeping the address, unless your old 
provider is willing to forward your mail for you. That's a consequence 
of assuming that your original email provider would always provide the 
quality of service you need at a price you would be willing to pay.

For each user in a mail domain to be able to independently forward their 
mail to their current mail service provider, you need something similar 
to DNS's registrar/registry system where the service that provides the 
redirection is regulated in such a way as to prevent capture (and also 
hopefully keep the costs down).   Either that or you need email 
addresses that are so meaningless that nobody will want to actually use 
them by themselves, but only via some search facility.

You can do this with SMTP today, but the SMTP server that's listed as an 
MX for your domain has to be willing to forward your mail.  SMTP 551 
redirects were deprecated a very long time ago.

AFAIK there always have been services that would provide stable email 
addresses, accept your incoming mail, and forward that mail to wherever 
you want.    But it's hard to operate such a service for free, 
especially given the volume of spam and malware that's constantly 
attacking anything that accepts inbound traffic.

As for DNS redirection of email, reread RFC 883.   It's somewhat light 
on detail and doesn't provide any way to distinguish [e-mail] 
from [e-mail] (which for those who aren't intimately familiar 
with SMTP, are actually potentially-distinct addresses).  It also 
doesn't explicitly deal with EAI.   Those technical problems are, I'm 
sure, fixable.  But DNS redirection of email been tried before and 
abandoned.   That doesn't mean it was inherently a bad idea, but for 
whatever reason Internet email's evolution didn't take that path.

Keith

p.s. In principle, I would support an effort to standardize MR or some 
new DNS record to do mail redirects, and perhaps also an effort to set 
up some domains (perhaps even under a new purpose-created TLD) with 
independent registries for individual email addresses.   But to me it 
looks like there are significant barriers to deployment of such a 
service.   Unless governments force them to, how many Big Mail Providers 
are willing to do an extra MX lookup for outgoing mail just to 
potentially lose customers by doing so?  For that matter, how many email 
users would want to use such a service, when in practice you're already 
penalized by numerous web sites that flag your email address as an 
error, if your email domain isn't that of a well-known Big Mail Provider?

Email today has a lot bigger usability problems than difficulty of 
setting up portable addresses.