Need ability "port" email addresses

Some here. I think my home domain is about that same age. I even have my own class C address space :smile:

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I have used a Gmail address for as long as I have known of Gmail. No problems and good spam filtering. I’ve had several ISPs since then. Choose your own


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I have no doubt that if this were legislated then ISPs could do it - at no explicit cost to the former customer. It would be inefficient in that all email would be “routed” via the old ISP, taking longer to get to its destination and using up more bandwidth doing so.

There would be problems though 


What if eventually you forget your username and password with the first ISP that you had 25 years ago, and whose domain you are still using even though you long ceased to have a relationship with them, and so can no longer update the forwarding? (By then you have moved ISP seven times and you have to update the first ISP each time you move.)

What if the first ISP goes out of business? Or the domain simply goes away due to corporate restructure?

What if you eventually create a forwarding loop?

Most people who have looked at this problem decide that your best option is to take the one-off pain of replacing your ISP email address with an email address that is independent of your ISP. You can take as long as you need to do that and then leave your current ISP.

Analogies with global roaming or mobile number portability aren’t really relevant. The mobile phone network was designed to be able to do this. Email was not.

This would mostly work if SMTP clients behaved appropriately in response to the 551 reply. That is to say, the 551 reply appears to have been specified more or less for this purpose.

Has anyone looked at what

a) SMTP servers when acting as SMTP clients do in response to a 551 ?

b) end-user SMTP clients do in response to a 551 ?

However for this to work, all SMTP clients in the entire world would have to be updated, if required, to do the right thing with 551. This is the problem. No amount of legislation from the Australian government will make this happen.

It could be then that email will be even more unreliable than it already is, with some email that is sent to the old ISP email address being delivered correctly (because the sender recognises the 551) and some email is bounced.

From the recent ACCC’s Communications Sector Market Study Draft Report, proposed action 16:
We will review the email retention options that service providers offer to consumers and
determine whether the charges they impose are reflective of the underlying cost of providing
the standalone email service. As part of this review, we propose to consider the potential
costs and benefits of introducing an email portability regime.

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 another with own domain, & email via Melbourne HQ’d fastmail.com

In the past everybody has been issued an ISP email because you’ve also needed it to log in. With line authentication this is not normally required. Perhaps the ISP’s will drop ISP-email or make it optional in the future.

2010 Israel email portability billhttp://www.circleid.com/posts/20100222_email_portability_approved_by_knesset_committee/

April 2017 document “Is it time top introduce email portability?”
http://axiomeconomics.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Note-on-Email-Portability-.pdf

The New Zealand Productivity Commission raised this possibility recently, when it observed
that the absence of email address portability was “a remaining barrier to switching in the
telecommunications industry”
"a lot of people still use email addresses provided by their RSP - often because it was the first one they ever got and have used it ever since. The prospect of changing this unique identifier to something else can be a bit of nightmare. Just think about it for a moment:
:black_small_square: How many online accounts does a typical customer have linked to her email address, e.g., online banking, insurance, social media, retail sites? Research done last year 
 indicates that most consumers have around 100 online accounts linked to their email addresses – and this number is doubling every five years. That’s an awful lot of details to update – potentially hours and hours of work.
:black_small_square: If a customer doesn’t update all her details before changing email addresses, she could be locked out of those online accounts. Most sites send a ‘confirmation email’ to the previous email address before those changes can be made. If that address is no longer accessible, then she won’t be able to ‘click on the link’ to confirm the transfer. The same problem applies to forgotten passwords.
:black_small_square: If the customer is a business, considerable time and effort may have been invested in promoting the way that customers can get in touch. There might be significant costs associated with updating your business letterheads and online templates to reflect the new details, reprinting all branded stationery, business cards and so on.
:black_small_square: A typical customer may have hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of contacts in her address book. Quite a lot of them may not bother to update their contact details in response to a ‘new contact details’ email and they might send future messages to the wrong place. One of those messages might contain a potentially lucrative business opportunity that goes amiss.

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I’ll bite


Friends don’t let friends use I/RSP email addresses.

And who’s paying for this portability??? I better not be
 I had some sense 25 years ago.

Then you/they should’ve set up a domain, if it has anything to do with business.

Basic business sense since “online” was invented.

Here’s another thought
 If I see a company that doesn’t have their own email address at their own domain (for at least the last 10 years), I think they aren’t smart enough to be online, and trusted with my details, so I’m not going to trust them with my business.

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Yes yes and yes. I can’t work out what all the fuss is about really - and who would want a telstra or optus, etc etc name in their address anyway?

Things change - I’ve changed street addresses many times, never expected 22 Womble Road Wimbledon to follow me everywhere, just updated everything. What about portable credit card numbers - its a pain when you have to change them because someone misuses it (joke intended).

And agreed and doubly so for the so-called professionals who want the 20 page form filled out with all your personal and private details and 5 grand of your hard earned when they have an address like snake_oil2748@hotmail.com. Goodbye. :slight_smile:

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Quite a few years ago NASA sponsored a research program to resolve ‘where are you’ internet communications. The simplistic premise was if you wanted to contact me you should be able to ‘where’s Phil’ in real time and I would answer regardless whether I was in Houston TX, Melbourne, Victoria, Tokyo, Japan, or in orbit. There were many practical matters such as do not disturbs, holidays and avoiding business contacts, as well as the expected communication fails and finding Phil in the scheme of billions of destination people who could each be anywhere. Needless to say there was no product delivered :smiley:

But the point is the premise of portability has been around for many decades and will probably be resolved in a pragmatic, inexpensive way some day, but not yet with current technology, and current internet technology may delay it for further decades.

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Should we simply have a National .au email server we can all use (free for basic limited use, fee for a bit more)? We were all used to paying postage and for STD phone calls. And it helps the federal govt with keeping up with our meta data?

It’s also true that you can get a hosted solution and pay annually for a registered and unique domain name with many ISP’s. You can indeed change who your host is and it does not need to even be your ISP. Although I often hesitate to read or send email to an address I don’t recognise.

While the problem with email address portability might not be easy to resolve, it is largely self inflicted. We chose to join the online world before there was any www.xxxx or even web pages. Hence it was our choice to use Telstra (Bigpong) on dial up the day after it arrived, or not. Still the cost over STD was always a limitation anyway. The choice of Email provider was also a no brainer, no choice really.

We as a nation also chose not to control or regulate the net and importantly we chose to allow it to take over many aspects of our lives without ever challenging the protagonists. We love the net - mostly.

It’s too late to go back, but if we want a solution there is still the option of a national email server, and perhaps one day it will adopt all the orphaned domains our mail still goes too!

The federal government helps itself very well thank you. We pay taxes for their pollie pay and perks, the military, border abuse department, the partially strangled medicare, and the most basic of services like extracting money from us via the ATO, and mostly passable weather forecasts from the BOM. Centrelink? Does non-functional count? ACCC, maybe but.

Everything else has been constructed as a government owned for-profit business, and the states are even more enthusiastic about the concept. A national email server? I can see it now, $150 p.a. indexed to inflation, no discounts for anyone on hard street or disadvantaged excepting through Centrelink abuse. Why do you get the dole to download porn on the net and why do you need an email; a stat dec will be demanded annually. Spam? Not their problem, they are just a server providing a service.

A private company? The NBN will extract its tolls and deliver its ‘great service’. Value added with cost of value added to the email server service.

A good idea, but be careful what you wish for in this time of a $ driven libertarian government that believes the best government is no government and everything we do is also funded by user-pays (with profit added).

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Not a wish, just an observation, and one potential remedy.
One that does not need me to sign my every detail away to a free email service that trades my every detail, and tagged personal image if I choose to use it’s cloud photo service.
As a consumer I’d rather pay for a service I can influence than use a free service that I cannot.

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ISP’s won’t get rid of their email service (default) as its an easy and simple way to 100% ensure everyone gets their invoice etc

I’m sure you are right that they won’t get rid of their email service but my ISP is more than happy to send all communication to my existing email address that is not associated with that ISP (or any other). That includes invoices, news spam, 


I do have an email address with the ISP but it is never used.

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So we would let government manage our email communications? No thanks!

The problem with email portability, as mentioned earlier, is that it isn’t designed to be portable. Imagine someone who rents, and moves houses regularly, but expects their physical mail to be forwarded from each of those addresses they’ve held for the last thirty years to their current address. It could be done, but it would need a radical redesign of postal services. (In fact, it is something I thought about in relation to physical email a few years ago - and there are ways it could be done, just not easily.)

You may also wish to consider whether you want your service provider from 20 years ago to see all the messages you receive and send today - because a lot of email still is not adequately secured.

While other respondents have said that email forwarding is not feasible with the current Internet, I think it’s worth adding that there are no changes in train that would change that. Things like IPv6 will enable the Internet to grow, and should make personal IP address ownership (and thus personal email servers) much more affordable, but will not change the underlying problem of forwarding email from a service provider.

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I have never sent or received a secure email. (That is in part laxness on my part.) I would like to know what tiny fraction of email is secure.

If government really wants to solve this problem, they could ban ISPs from providing mail service to any new customers. Problem solved. I am not suggesting that they do this.

Including overseas addresses? :slight_smile:

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Bouncing email addresses is already done, spammers use it to send their spam traffic from many different email addresses, nor does the RSP even need to see your email. They just need to put a script in place that when an old address is seen it it is sent onto the next address the user had supplied, and this can continue until it reaches the new active address. Another way of avoiding the problem is to pay for email address retention by the user at their old RSP. Where problems do come about is when the RSP totally ceases business (if they are bought out this does not occur).

What this forwarding does require is a bit of work that needs to be done to set up the forwarding and could easily be covered by a small fee if a user wanted that resource put in place. I think RSPs are somewhat reluctant to do the needed work as they are in business for themselves and are not in it to create ease of use for the users.

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No, it does not need to see the email. It may have a business reason to want to see it, though - and that in itself is concerning.

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