Email system provision is unregulated in the UK.

esuhl

Yup, this thread is still going.

And the perfect (simple!) solution exists already: just use an email provider that isn't tied to your ISP. Or, if you want to be able to keep your email address and be able to change providers as you wish, get a domain name. They're a few pounds a year! What could be simpler?!

With all of this proposed legislation, and the inherent incompatibilities of the existing email/DNS system... and the fact that legislation would only apply to the UK and the Internet is sort-or borderless... It would be cheaper to just change the law to force ISPs to register a domain name for any subscriber that doesn't already have one.

Not that it's a good idea, but at least it's cheap and easily implementable. Requiring email addresses to be ported would be incredibly expensive, technically complex, and provide no benefits that aren't already available. Why mess with a system that works?

debitcardmayhem

esuhl wrote: »

Yup, this thread is still going.

And the perfect (simple!) solution exists already: just use an email provider that isn't tied to your ISP. Or, if you want to be able to keep your email address and be able to change providers as you wish, get a domain name. They're a few pounds a year! What could be simpler?!

With all of this proposed legislation, and the inherent incompatibilities of the existing email/DNS system... and the fact that legislation would only apply to the UK and the Internet is sort-or borderless... It would be cheaper to just change the law to force ISPs to register a domain name for any subscriber that doesn't already have one.

Not that it's a good idea, but at least it's cheap and easily implementable. Requiring email addresses to be ported would be incredibly expensive, technically complex, and provide no benefits that aren't already available. Why mess with a system that works?

In red not quite valid
Apple and Microsoft, and many others, don't always follow standards. As for technically complex that is absolute nonesense it is a one line config change. Why I am pointing this out to you esuhl I am not sure , it is not to enter into a discussion with you in this thread.This thread should have been closed (not the forum member)or moved

vofs007

tronator wrote: »

That's the point, everybody has to speculate what you mean in your petition. There's no single word about what aspect of emails you want to be regulated.

Keeping an email address of a domain you don't own for life is nonsense and doesn't need to be regulated.

Imagine there is a gym in the apartment block you live in and you're free to use it for as long as you live there. Do you still expect to use it after you moved out? And do you also expect Royal Mail to forward all your emails forever?

If you want an email address for life, get your own domain and host it with the email provider of your choice. There's nothing which needs to be regulated. Everything works perfectly as is...

There is nothing in the petition about having an email address for life.
What have you got against giving consumers an arbritration service for resolving disputes with email system providers ?

See
http://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/shopping/2014/03/how-should-consumer-complaints-be-handled-the-government-wants-to-know

for background information.

vofs007

Only 24 hours left to sign the petition. If email is important to you, please register your concern. You know it makes sense.

http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/48917

Cycrow

email is important to me.
Thats why i run my own server and have my own domain

rmg1

Just read the entirety of this thread and I'm now sat here thinking "what a load of cobblers".
If I lose my email adress (it's a gmail one), then I'll sit and think "!!!!!!!".
Then I'll sign up to a new one, transfer over all my emails (it'll take a while but so what, it was a free service with no guarantees) to the new provider.
I use Thunderbird with IMAP setup so my PC has a copy of all the emails I've ever sent/received and I've transferred between email providers before.

And now for the technical bit (and I'm happy to be corrected on any of this).
This is how I could see email transfer working.....
All ISPs keep a copy of a "master" database (or remotely link to it) which holds all current email addresses.
This has 2 fields in it:-
1) The email address you've been assigned or made up
2) the address of the "current" provider (i.e. an updated email address).

If you move ISPs, you update the relevant records in the master database and everything is re-routed accordingly.
There is no need to keep multiple records per person/email address as you're only bothered about the original and latest addresses/ISPs.

Assuming 1 billion (using 1000 million as a billion) email addresses and a standard length of 64 characters, then that's 2 billion email addresses.
From memory, 1 character=1byte.
So that's 2 billion multiplied by 64 which is 128 billion bytes.
Now for the calculator.......(can't divide things by 1024 in my head)
128 billion bytes=125,000,000 KB
125,000,000 KB=122,070.31 MB
122,070.31 MB=119.20929GB

This is hardly the biggest database in the world is it.

Now, I've never dealt with implementing emails but I do know about databases.
1 billion records won't fit in MS Access, but something like SQL would quite happily hold all of it and, properly indexed, any record(s) could be updated in milliseconds.

The overheads for referring to this "master" database would be so small as to be meaningless.

The only possible problem you might run into is database corruption but proper backups would alleviate this and you're emails would be down for a matter of hours (at the outside if you have a proper failover cluster, etc) while everything was restored and brought back up to date.

Trinitrotoluene

All ISPs keep a copy of a "master" database (or remotely link to it) which holds all current email addresses.
This has 2 fields in it:-
1) The email address you've been assigned or made up
2) the address of the "current" provider (i.e. an updated email address).

The idea of this is..... flabbergasting. I'm going to put aside technical limitations for the time being and focus on logistical problems.

What you are suggesting here would require full cooperation between every single person providing mail across the world, all activating the new system at the same time. It would probably be an undertaking of such a scale that the world would never had seen such a thing. We'll disregard the difficulty of getting everyone to agree to this as well, because certain people are not going to bother nor are they going to want to do this.

There are many more logistical problems but technically it would never work because:

1) Every mail server administrator would need a level of write access to the database, leading to the scope for massive levels of abuse

2) An entire infrastructure and protocol would have to be designed to facilitate the database, its replication/setup to hundreds of thousands of servers, hardware funded, developers funded. SMTP would have to be re-written to account for the lookups

3) The database is going to be much bigger than you think. You'd have to take into account previous addresses, date they were modified, who has permission to modify the entry, who modified the entry last, when the entry was created and a hell of a lot more entries.

4) Who is going to fund this because it is going to cost billions, if not hundreds of billions? How can we get everyone to use it because unless there is universal agreement for everyone with a mail server, globally, it couldn't be implemented

5) The database is either in one location (and would have to deal with trillions of queries a day) or it replicates across hundreds of thousands of mail servers, multiple times a day which has numerous problems associated with it

I could probably give you another 95 reasons why this is an awful idea, but I don't have the time.

1 billion records won't fit in MS Access, but something like SQL would quite happily hold all of it and, properly indexed, any record(s) could be updated in milliseconds.

There is no way on this Earth that this could be an SQL database.

RumRat

25 people find it important enough to sign a petition...I'm guessing that it's not going anywhere..;)

rmg1

Trinitrotoluene wrote: »

The idea of this is..... flabbergasting. I'm going to put aside technical limitations for the time being and focus on logistical problems.

And the rest of it here.......

What you are suggesting here would require full cooperation between every single person providing mail across the world, all activating the new system at the same time. It would probably be an undertaking of such a scale that the world would never had seen such a thing. We'll disregard the difficulty of getting everyone to agree to this as well, because certain people are not going to bother nor are they going to want to do this.
No it doesn't, it only requires co-operation of anyone who wants to keep their email address when they change ISP.

There are many more logistical problems but technically it would never work because:

1) Every mail server administrator would need a level of write access to the database, leading to the scope for massive levels of abuse True, but then again the oportunity for abuse is already there with the current setup, albeit on a smaller scale.

2) An entire infrastructure and protocol would have to be designed to facilitate the database, its replication/setup to hundreds of thousands of servers, hardware funded, developers funded. SMTP would have to be re-written to account for the lookups Why? How does the generation of website names get distributed around the world for people to check before they buy one? Why can't a similar system be used? As has already been stated, SMTP would have to be re-written but (again, already stated) not by a huge amount.

3) The database is going to be much bigger than you think. You'd have to take into account previous addresses, date they were modified, who has permission to modify the entry, who modified the entry last, when the entry was created and a hell of a lot more entries. Why would you be interested in the middle-points if someone has moved ISP several times? You need the address it was sent to and the address it needs to arrive at (and maybe the date of the last change). OK, double the size of the database, still not beyond the realms of possibility.

4) Who is going to fund this because it is going to cost billions, if not hundreds of billions? How can we get everyone to use it because unless there is universal agreement for everyone with a mail server, globally, it couldn't be implemented Who funds all the companies that register website names? Assuming this needs to be funded separately, 10p for every email address currently in use would soon generate quite a bit of revenue. Make that a monthly charge (£1.20 a year isn't a huge amount, less than a website).

5) The database is either in one location (and would have to deal with trillions of queries a day) or it replicates across hundreds of thousands of mail servers, multiple times a day which has numerous problems associated with it Such as? I've dealt with database replication on large-scale databases in SQL. It all hinges on the initial set-up for the transaction logs (and how many changes do you envisage there to be on a daily basis)? Reading records (even trillions of them) isn't difficult if you have the right set-up.

I could probably give you another 95 reasons why this is an awful idea, but I don't have the time.




There is no way on this Earth that this could be an SQL database. Again, why? it's certainly scalable enough to handle this sort of transaction load and the size of the database (even doubled from my initial guesstimate).

System

How does the generation of website names get distributed around the world for people to check before they buy one?

It is currently hierarchical. It starts at the right hand end, finds the registrar for the TLD and its DNS servers then goes there and finds out the next level etc until fully resolved (Simple explanation, there are shortcuts that are done). The difference is that every domain is capable of having 1 million or more email addresses So do you have a master database capable of holding billions of records because I don't see that you can not have a hierarchical system for email addresses.