That does seem beneficial for the most part, but do you have ideas about how to handle the use cases like establishing new relationships (what, if anything, do you put on business cards?) or allowing the general public or a broad audience to contact you (what, if anything, do you put in advertisements, on your web site, on slides of a conference presentation, in an e-mail signature on mailing lists?).
- allow work calls and disallow family calls 9-5 weekdays only - allow family calls but not work calls to bypass do not disturb by ringing a second time - allow annoying acquaintance who wants tech support to only call on weekends, and to only ring on second call - if working two jobs, prevent each workplace from calling during other workplace's scheduled hours - add geofencing. don't allow community/neighbor calls while at work.
Basically, just add rules for each contact/group for when your phone will ring. Android used to have multiple sound profiles available, and IIRC allowed you to change the volume and default ringer, these could be activated automatically on a schedule. Now we only have Do Not Disturb, and that's it.
I initially signed up for the trail when the service launched. The first or second time I went to check the site/app it wasn't working. I was pretty much done with it at that point. I probably should have given it more of a chance and maybe they worked that out, but at $99/year for email my tolerance for issues is pretty low. They did (I suppose still do) have a lot of neat ideas around email though.
A benefit is that you might let messages to some or all of those 1:1 addresses be sorted one way (e.g., they ping you) while messages to some or all of the many:1 addresses are sorted another way (e.g., you only check for them with a much longer interval). But then again, a diligently-maintained contact list can be leveraged to achieve same...
In practice, I suspect the intention is mostly to use catch-all addresses for situations where the email address is a key in a database and like a login and stuff and not an entry in an individual's contacts list.
So the problem is that [email protected] or [email protected] is accessible to anyone who can use the SMTP protocol. And a phone number is accessible to anyone who texts it. That’s crazy.
Instead, we shouldn’t have DNS or centralized domains at all. DNS is just a glorified search engine that only really helps you find the root resource at a site, the /index.html thing. The vast majority of URLs on the Web aren’t going to be verbally shared anyway so you may as well store them as non-human-readable strings and let people save some local or hosted index. The titles and other metadata can be taken just like google does.
In this case, sending an email would require the recipient to have given out a capability that was received by you. And if some capability was compromised, they’d just deactivate it. It’s like this dude’s email aliases, but far better
Or if for a specific forum - [email protected]
Ideally, this would also be the case for physical mail. Multiple revokable tokens, not publicly tied to your physical address.
The whole idea of revokable tokens would pose an issue for any company that sends bills, as I assume revoking address tokens would be common with them. I'm sure there are many situations like this.
Welcome to the 19th century! Which is when mail redirection to a new address was introduced in the UK. I'd be amazed if it wasn't around then or earlier in the USA as well. Simply fill out a form and your mail will be redirected for up to two years (albeit at a cost). Or use a PO box and a mail forwarding service which offers filtering of junk mail. I used one for years when I used to move around a lot for less than £100 a year.
That’s not the same thing. Everyone still has your old address and you need to update it with them. Not terribly painful if you move once every 5 years. Pretty annoying and error prone if you move every 6 months.
A PO box would be fine, but it's not an acceptable address with many businesses, so it's not a universal solution to the problem.
Type something like P0 B0X
Type the address of the post office and then the PO Box number like an apartment number
The sad part is when your email leaks from big companies, you definitely know. I started getting viagra spam delivered to [email protected] back in 2007, long before their "big data breach", so it was only a matter of time before that companies pattern of poor security caught up with them.
Email should have always been a bidirectional address, representing the relationship between the sender and receiver, and not a wide open receiver for anybody who happens to have your address.