Jonathan Allard

Email Addresses Are Ugly: Email 2.0

I hate email addresses. Even if they are the main way of identifying someone on the internet, they are often so ugly. For most, there will be a @gmail.com or @hotmail.com in their email, or worse, an internet provider, like @sympatico.ca.

When trying to establish a personal brand or even professional brand, these providers get in the way of having a streamlined, “clean” brand.

For example, what does having @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com in your email say about you? Would you write this on a resumé, how would that affect your reputation for an employer? Maybe Gmail users are generally more tech-savvy than Yahoo Mail users. You see how that fragment can taint your image.

Email addresses also suffer from another caveat. Were one to change providers, the email address will have to change. The email address is, by design, tied to a provider.

Tod Maffin explains other problems with our email solution.

Why are email addresses tied to a server in first place? It seems unrealistic that everyone would register and setup their own domain just to have an email. Which is basically everyone on the Internet. Which is basically everyone.

In the olden days of Internet dinosaurs, there were fewer users, servers and so registering under one employer that had the Internet was rare enough it did the job.

Our relationship with the Internet has evolved. We no longer are tied to one server anymore. Most of the time you’ll a have a personal email, (or two, if you decided to change it) one for work, one for college, and it goes on. Now, what if I change jobs? Volunteer? Change names? Grow a beard?

My Personal Solution

So, to be free from the woes of being tied to a webmail provider name, I’ve registered my own domain name, and used it to provide a namespace for my email address. It looks more professional, and I can switch providers (who are being forwarded mail) whenever I want.

Twitter and Facebook

Down with the domain names! It makes sense. But like domain names (oh the irony) themselves, a small namespace will fill up quickly.

Needle in a Haystack

So basically, we need a way to reference people (or fake people, entities) in a namespace. In the “real world”, we use names. But they are far from being unique. Just lookup your name on Facebook.

What can we discriminate on? Gender? Birth? Favorite color? This brings up privacy issues. Numbers? We’d feel rather insignificant.

My least worst is nationality. We already do it with domain names. Hell, I’m doing it, as I write. jonathanallard.ca: “Jonathan Allard from Canada” Still, my name is not unique in Canada. And what if I move? What if I don’t feel Canadian?

How do you identify a single human on a seven-billion-human Earth?

Who Receives the Email?

Besides, eliminating domain names creates another problem: to whom (what server) should email be sent, now that the server domain is absent from the address?

One solution would be to have it encrypted and broadcasted across a peer-to-peer network, in a similar fashion to Bitcoin. Depending on the size of email, this would however put more strain on the network.

Let Me Write This Down

What is convenient, right now, is that we can use a simple string to represent a mailbox.

Email 2.0: To the Whiteboard!

Let’s design email 2.0.

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