"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 15:34 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: "SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services) by khim
Parent article: A note for MXroute users

> there are increasing pressure to ensure that phone number is tightly tied to the government-provided ID. But that wouldn't work with e-mail

Hmmm... have you tried obtaining a /truly/ anonymous email address? I.e., one that is not connected to other things that are likely connected to you (e.g., to your common access network, your mobile phone number, an existing 'usable' email address). One that is usable, where the email you send will actually end up in the Inbox of the recipient - bearing in mind that in statistical terms most valid recipients these days have their Inbox hosted by a fairly small number of large tech companies, who generally will hide incoming emails from hosts that allow anonymous registration of email users - if not outright reject them.

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"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 16:01 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes. I self-host my email and other than being tied to me by the domain registration (which is not really tied to my personal ID through anything official), my email addresses are not connected to any other identity.

And I haven't had deliverability issues, including to the big ones like Gmail and Hotmail.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 16:03 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

I bet you have paid for that domain multiple times with a card in your name, and with different cards over time.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 16:11 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, but only the domain registrar or its payment processor knows which card I've used, not some central identity agency.

Obviously, if the government really wanted to find out who was behind my domain, they could find it in 30 seconds. But that's not what we're talking about here; we're talking about an identity authority that can strongly tie a specific email address to a person.

"SMTP has outlived its usefulness" (was: Forwarding services)

Posted Jan 16, 2026 17:04 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

At least for my purposes in this side-thread, the context is growing authoritarianism in previously-liberal-democracies, and so the (eventual) threat-model I consider - in terms of a threat to society generally in being able to organise itself to resist in the face of some future significant over-reach - is the nation-state and its SIGINT, for a value of SIGINT that acknowledges that many of these previously-liberal-democracies co-operate and share wrt SIGINT. Even if other members did not wish to support a particular member engaged in some over-reach, the sharing of data and of exploits may /already/ have been carried as a routine thing prior to whatever over-reach and civil issues that arise.

You or I may not face any threat today. We don't know about the future. We may not even participate in any wrong-doing/resistance, but some "AI" tool may flag us as suspicious for whatever combination of various innocuous things the "AI" hallucinates as suspicious, leading to some agent then blindly putting the various threads in the data together to figure out that dskoll.ca was paid for by various cards belonging to you and putting further agents on the case to "just doing their job" to haul you in and ransack your house and anything else to look for further evidence.

We're not there yet, but we're sliding towards to it.

Now, the point where we still feel we don't /really/ need anonymity, the point where we can see how "Think of the Children!" is a fair trade-off, the point /before/ the over-reach that leads us to need anonymity, is the point where the authorities remove anonymity from us - quite naturally. And this is the point where we should resist that, even though there are seemingly reasonable "But... the children!" arguments.