It is so hard to get an email address without providing an email or SMS verification. Like 9/10 on the internet difficulty scale.
Any site that lets you receive email for example by generating a random inbox seems to be blocked by the more full-featured ones that let you send email. I’ve spent the last week trying to get an email address doing lots of searches and trying to signup for any email address at all without success.
This makes sense if you understand that bots cause problems universally but at the same time the personal information strategy isn’t working. Spammers have no problem getting email accounts and every other kind of account. It’s the honest person who won’t go to the dark side and pay for stolen accounts that is in the worst shape.
Maybe you want to setup your own mail server? Ther you need a domain name and registars want even more information. Many of them give you privacy on your domain records, but this is no defense from the surveillance state.
If as said in the sidebar mass surveillance is about mass control, and not justice, then email is an extremely important technology to start supporting for privacy and freedom.
Spam and abuse are problems to be sure but there must be other ways to solve them than by providing information that links back to the real world.
Now what can we do about it?
See table “Email Hosting market share table” https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting--23
Google, Microsoft, and Godaddy collectively control 79% of the email market. You effectively can’t deliver email if they – the first two in particular – say you can’t. So every other provider has to dance to their tune. This is, at this point, an economic problem.
If you want to re-decentralize email, and the web overall, you have to figure out what to do about the increasing concentration of Internet infra into an ever-smaller number of hands. I’m guessing there is not a technical solution to this.
We need dead simple turn key solutions for self hosted services. Simple as setting up a wifi router or some other consumer focused device.
Users get to use networks on terms dictated by their ISP’s. My ISP blocks self-hosted email. They did so because it was not in their interest – spammers were using the functionality to run spam ops. They still allow for self-hosting, but as self-hosting becomes more popular, ISPs’ residential networks are going to become a security minefield and an increasing liability. They will tighten the screws on what people are allowed to self-host and how, or they’ll just make it painful to impossible.