The email portability bill has just been approved by the Knesset's committee for legislation, sending it on its way for the full legislation process of the Israeli parliament.
While many users own a free email account, many in Israel still make use of their ISP's email service.
According to this proposed bill, when a client transfers to a different ISP the email address will optionally be his to take along, "just like" mobile providers do today with phone numbers.
This new legislation makes little technological sense, and will certainly be a mess to handle operationally as well as beurocratically, but it certainly is interesting, and at least the notion is beautiful.
The proposed bill can be found here [Doc, Hebrew]:
http://my.ynet.co.il/pic/computers/22022010/mail.doc
Linked to from this ynet (leading Israeli news site) story, here:
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3852744,00.html
I will update this as things evolve on my blog, here:
http://gadievron.blogspot.com/
Gadi.
Why does this seem like a really bad idea?
-james
While I think the principal is noble there are operational problems:
1) Large and increasing quantity of email will be forwarded between Israeli ISPs, loading their networks with traffic that could have been avoided.
2) Every time someone changes ISP and wants to continue using this address they will need to notify their original ISP, who they may not have had a business relationship with for many years. This will be a significant operational challenge I expect. How do you confirm the person notifying you is the real owner of the address, for example?
IMHO it would have been better to require the ISPs to forward the email for a reasonable period of time (say 3 months) to allow the user to make relevant notifications (or just stop using an ISP bound email address).
Unfortunately the links cited are in Hebrew so I'm only going on Gadi's report here.
Cheers,
Rob
Bring back the MB or MR DNS records? (Only half a smiley.)
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
I am sure the various carriers faced with the onset of Local Number
Portability and WLNP in this part of the world would have been happy to
escape with only forwarding phone calls for 3 months.
Alas, such was not their fate 
I would watch out for this idea, it might actually catch on in various
places, warts and all...
To me that seems reasonable. but if they do what has been suggested how long
before the rest of world implements the same policy? Also wouldn't this help
put the final nails in email's coffin? Also what about ISPs choosing to stop
providing email services?
Why does this seem like a really bad idea?
While I think the principal is noble there are operational problems:
1) Large and increasing quantity of email will be forwarded between
Israeli ISPs, loading their networks with traffic that could have been
avoided.
Same thing applies to mobile companies. Realistically, this isn't going to be a
particularly massive amount of traffic.
2) Every time someone changes ISP and wants to continue using this
address they will need to notify their original ISP, who they may not
have had a business relationship with for many years. This will be a
significant operational challenge I expect. How do you confirm the
person notifying you is the real owner of the address, for example?
This bit is slightly more difficult. All the same, you can easily figure out a
password system for talking to support (with a login password, and a support
password, say. Not the most secure thing possible, but in practise as good as
any ISPs mail system's is likely to be.)
IMHO it would have been better to require the ISPs to forward the email
for a reasonable period of time (say 3 months) to allow the user to make
relevant notifications (or just stop using an ISP bound email address).
Changing an email address takes far longer than 3 months, ime. I still get the
odd mail to one I stopped using 3-4 years ago.
There's no way to do this without some underlying forwarding... and
aside from the obvious inefficiencies, bear in mind that any spam
mitigation devices on the last hop that decide they are receiving spam
are going to direct their wrath (reputation scores, blacklisting,
greylisting, rate limiting, what-have-you) at the last forwarding hop,
not at the origin.
We get enough collateral damage from legitimate voluntary forwarding
already. I would shudder to think of mandated, irrevocable forwarding.
Jeff
Why does this seem like a really bad idea?
While I think the principal is noble there are operational problems:
I dare say.
I own example. I fire George for a long list of foul deeds. He goes to
work for another company and writes email from george@example.com that
injures my reputation.
Not a good plan at all.
1) Large and increasing quantity of email will be forwarded between
Israeli ISPs, loading their networks with traffic that could have been
avoided.
Believe it or not, some people have email addresses that are not
intrinsically "ISP" addresses.
2) Every time someone changes ISP and wants to continue using this address
they will need to notify their original ISP, who they may not have had a
business relationship with for many years. This will be a significant
operational challenge I expect. How do you confirm the person notifying
you is the real owner of the address, for example?
Again, it might all be within one ISP--and is still irrelevant.
IMHO it would have been better to require the ISPs to forward the email
for a reasonable period of time (say 3 months) to allow the user to make
relevant notifications (or just stop using an ISP bound email address).
Governments requiring people to do things that are not good ideas often
have unexpected (even if obvious) consequences.
My reaction, if I were in a position to do so, would be to stop
providing email addresses.
Unfortunately the links cited are in Hebrew so I'm only going on Gadi's
report here.
Why is that relevant?
Gadi Evron wrote:
The email portability bill has just been approved by the Knesset's
committee for legislation, sending it on its way for the full
legislation process of the Israeli parliament.
While many users own a free email account, many in Israel still make use
of their ISP's email service.
According to this proposed bill, when a client transfers to a different
ISP the email address will optionally be his to take along, "just like"
mobile providers do today with phone numbers.
Likely result: less ISPs will offer email services as part of the
package, or will find some other way to shift responsibility to a third
party.
--Patrick
>
>> Why does this seem like a really bad idea?
>
> While I think the principal is noble there are operational problems:
I dare say.
I own example. I fire George for a long list of foul deeds. He goes to
work for another company and writes email from george@example.com that
injures my reputation.
Not a good plan at all.
> 1) Large and increasing quantity of email will be forwarded between
> Israeli ISPs, loading their networks with traffic that could have been
> avoided.
Believe it or not, some people have email addresses that are not
intrinsically "ISP" addresses.
> 2) Every time someone changes ISP and wants to continue using this address
> they will need to notify their original ISP, who they may not have had a
> business relationship with for many years. This will be a significant
> operational challenge I expect. How do you confirm the person notifying
> you is the real owner of the address, for example?
Again, it might all be within one ISP--and is still irrelevant.
Actually, this is really simple to fix. Don't provide smtp service, only
pop/imap. Then they never need to contact you. At least one Irish ISP already
does something similar for ex-subscribers.
I think, it will apply only users's email address, not of employee of the
particular ISP.
--Mustafa
I dare say.
I own example. I fire George for a long list of foul deeds. He goes to
work for another company and writes email from george@example.com that
injures my reputation.
I suspect we are only talking about email addresses provided as part of a
commercial service, not as an aspect of one's job.
For example, if I have a Nextel cellphone, and then they get bought by
Sprint and I decide they now suck, and I move my phone service to T-Mobile
so I can get a cool new G1, then Sprint is obliged to release my phone
number and let T-Mobile provide my new service using it.
However, if I work for Bob's Widgets, and they fire me because I'm a
slacker, I'm not expecting I get to keep the number associated with my
work-issued cellphone, no matter what carrier issued it... Even if Bob's
Widgets was really a carrier providing a phone on their own network...
-dorn
There are huge differences in LNP/WLNP vs. Email Address portability.
Prior to LNP/WLNP, there was already SS7 which is, essentially a centralized
layer of indirection for phone numbers. This was necessary in order to support
multiple LECs serving the same NPA-NXX anyway. Once that was in place,
LNP/WLNP was almost a no-brainer from a call routing perspective. The
issue was with the administrative process and the level of ethics exhibited
by some of the phone-company participants (slamming, etc.). We saw the
same thing in DNS. LNP is much more like domain name portability
than email address portability. We already have domain name portability
and had it long before LNP/WLNP.
The owner of a domain has always been able to change the NS records
pointing to the authoritative DNS servers for said domain.
If users care about email portability, they should simply get their own
domain and move the domain around as they see fit. Given google
and other email hosting providers which will trivially host your email
domain and the low annual cost of registering a domain, I'm not sure
why legislators would think doing it differently is a good idea. If I were
an Israeli ISP and this law were to pass, I'd simply discontinue providing
email service for my customers and suggest they get their email via
Google, Yahoo, or other free email service.
Owen
A thing being missed here is this:
A telephone number does not have an obvious affinity with personal
intellectual-property-like information. (402 332-XXXX is not obviously
a Northwest Bell-USWest-Quest telephone number, but at least two of them
are now served by Cox. A person using a 917 NNX-XXXX number in has now
turned useful information into noise, but that is not quite the same thing.)
An email address that ends in example.com irrevocably ties the address
user to the company Example and may in fact be affirmatively harmful
beyond the technical difficulty of implementation.
I have an idea. Everyone just get a gmail (or otherwise "neutral" account) like me.com or gmail.com or yahoo.com and be done with it.
J
For the same reason that if I cited a link that lead to a page in Latvian,
you'd have a hard time double-checking that my 4-line summary of the page
actually matched what the page said, so you'd have to run with my 4-line
summary.
Google Translate actually does a reasonable job at first-pass translation
of Latvian that captures the general gist of it, but it still makes me
facepalm on occasion. Of course, the more critical the exact nuances,
the more likely it is to egregiously screw up. "It's 17C in Riga" works
fine, but the distinction between "mandate new laws" and "recommend new policies"
still troubles it.
xyz@gmail.com for beta-users, like you and me; while xyz@google.com for
employees. But surely it will create technical implication along with many
others.
You don't note when you are taking somebody's word when they write in
English.
Just out of interest, are those ISP-tied e-mail addresses always run by the ISP, or are they occasionally outsourced in the manner of Rogers' (Canada) or BT's (UK) respective deals with Yahoo! (US)?
It'd be an interesting twist if contracts between e-mail providers outside Israel and ISPs inside suddenly made this requirement for e-mail address portability leak beyond Israel's borders.
Joe