{"id":145,"date":"2007-10-05T21:36:10","date_gmt":"2007-10-06T01:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/2007\/10\/05\/e-mail-address-forwarding\/"},"modified":"2007-10-05T22:21:44","modified_gmt":"2007-10-06T02:21:44","slug":"e-mail-address-forwarding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/?p=145","title":{"rendered":"E-Mail Address Portability?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, someone decided to petition the FCC for something amazingly stupid: they want the FCC to force ISP's to provide 'e-mail address portability'<\/a>. Just like with telephone numbers, this individual thinks it's a good idea.<\/p>\n

This person doesn't seem to understand the difference between a phone number and a domain name. Domain names are actually entities, bought and owned by someone or a company. The key word is owned<\/strong>. You don't 'own' the email address, in essence, you're 'renting' it! You stop paying, or you move elsewhere, do you really expect the owner to keep handling your e-mail? Even the Postal Service doesn't do this! They'll forward your mail for a few weeks until you notify everyone, and then they're done and out of the loop.<\/p>\n

Also, think about the inefficiencies of such a requirement. Over time, someone could change email addresses 2, 3, maybe even 5 times. Say I send an email to address #1 with a 10Mb attachment. According to this petition, the email sent to address #1 would be forwarded to address #2, then from there to address #3, until it gets to address #5. My email has been handled by 5 different ISP's, and they all had to absorb the cost of moving my bytes over to another ISP, and so on. Absolutely ridiculous if you ask me.<\/p>\n

I'm all for asking ISP's to do something like this for a very short period of time<\/strong>, just like the Postal Service. But, I would do it somewhat differently. Instead of burdening the ISP's with handling large volumes of potentially large pieces of mail, why not have them issue a 'bounce' back to the sender, with a small note indicating the recipient has 'moved' and here is his\/her new email address. We're now talking about an email with a size of 1000 to 2000 bytes, instead of in the megabytes. We avoid forwarding spam, and if the sender email doesn't exist, no second bounce is issued, avoiding a mail loop. I know of a few ISP's that already do this as a courtesy to their customers who have decided to move on. That's just good business if you ask me; never ignore an ex-client, because they might want to come back in the future. <\/p>\n

So instead of petitioning for e-mail address portability, we should be asking ISP's to implement some sort of email 'address' forwarding\/bounce functionality instead. It's cleaner, more efficient and much less of a burden on ISP's and the infrastructure as a whole.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, someone decided to petition the FCC for something amazingly stupid: they want the FCC to force ISP's to provide 'e-mail address portability'. Just like with telephone numbers, this individual thinks it's a good idea. This person doesn't seem to understand the difference between a phone number and a domain name. Domain names are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek-stuff","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pA6RZ-2l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thehouse.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}