We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses

Posted by brisky on Sunday March 31, 2019 @09:04AM
from the self-post dept.

There should be a way to email business/individual according to their domain name and not knowing email address user prefix.

If you want to contact business.com there is either [email protected] or [email protected] or some other arbitrary prefix. These are not intuitive ways to contact the businneses or individuals owning domains.

What if we could send emails directly to @business.com? I believe this would make email a much more powerful tool.

( 7 comments | 4 points | on HN )

Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by x38iq84n on Sunday March 31, 2019 @09:09AM (#19535381)

Like RFC 2142? https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2142.txt

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Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by cocochanel on Sunday March 31, 2019 @09:16AM (#19535411)

Powerful for who, spammers? I don't think it is particularly useful, but if it is for some, it will definitely need to support blocking email at the generic domain.

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Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by brisky on Sunday March 31, 2019 @09:21AM (#19535439)

I agree that blocking would be needed. However if you are a business or individual that has email posted on the website it is not much harder for spammers to get it anyway.

Another usecase. Let's say I buy a domain myname.com for personal use. I might want people to contact me directly via @myname.com without having to create an unnatural sounding address like [email protected]. I have seen people buying @surname domains and then creating emails name@surname, which is pretty weird too.

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Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by g6nhe9twPd66 on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:01AM (#19535611)

...or you could just use Twitter which does exactly what you're asking for.

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Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by brisky on Sunday March 31, 2019 @10:39AM (#19535808)

Twitter is centralized platform where people down own their data. We need to think how to make open protocols better in order to improve the decentralized web

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Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by g6nhe9twPd66 on Sunday March 31, 2019 @12:38PM (#19536487)

As if email is any better? Just because you delete all your mail from your inbox, doesn't mean the requisite copies in your sender/recipient inboxes are deleted. Decentralized doesn't necessarily mean data ownership.

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Re:We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses by brisky on Sunday March 31, 2019 @12:42PM (#19536529)

Data ownership is just one aspect. However i don't think twitter is good comparison to email at all. Email is for private communications and twitter is public social network.

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