We Need a "Verified Email" Standard
Email was personal in the 2000s. I used it to keep in touch with my friends, and with people I met in different corners of the internet. Spam existed back then, but it mostly stayed in the spam folder. My inbox was for people.
In those days, I could hand my email address to anyone and expect to read a message that they typed for me.
Today I can't. Instead, I can expect a stream of automated emails pouring in from five different sources.
We Need Strictly Personal Email Services
One approach is to switch to a personal domain and use per-service aliases. I recently moved from Gmail to a more personal, domain-based email (read my post on this).
But that won't work for everyone. Not everyone can own a domain, and most people don't even know what it is.
What we need is a global, ISO-like standard for verified personal email addresses, with these conditions:
- Every single email address under this standard should be verified — people, businesses, and organizations alike.
- It should be verified using a national ID, by a government-level authority.
- Every email address should carry a category — personal, type of business, and so on.
Next, users should be able to pick any email service that strictly follows this standard. Such a service should:
- Allow signing up only with a verified email address.
- Receive mail only from verified email addresses.
- Show a UI that neatly separates emails by category, with preset filters and a folder hierarchy to group mail from different businesses and services.
- Still allow sending to unverified addresses and allow receiving from it only in that email thread as an exception.
- Let users move to another email service whenever they want.
A quick search didn't turn up any global standard like this. A few countries like Germany, Italy, and Estonia already tried a version of this but none of them are a global standard that any email service can build on. But this is the kind of thing that should be standardized: A strictly personal email service where I can send emails to actual people, while everything else from services and utilities stays neatly categorized and filtered away.