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We should improve email protocol to allow userless addresses

4 points by brisky ↗ HN
There should be a way to email business/individual according to their domain name and not knowing email address user prefix.

If you want to contact business.com there is either info@business.com or hello@business.com or some other arbitrary prefix. These are not intuitive ways to contact the businneses or individuals owning domains.

What if we could send emails directly to @business.com? I believe this would make email a much more powerful tool.

7 comments

[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 22.4 ms ] thread
cocochanel
Powerful for who, spammers? I don't think it is particularly useful, but if it is for some, it will definitely need to support blocking email at the generic domain.
brisky
I agree that blocking would be needed. However if you are a business or individual that has email posted on the website it is not much harder for spammers to get it anyway.

Another usecase. Let's say I buy a domain myname.com for personal use. I might want people to contact me directly via @myname.com without having to create an unnatural sounding address like me@myname.com. I have seen people buying @surname domains and then creating emails name@surname, which is pretty weird too.

g6nhe9twPd66
...or you could just use Twitter which does exactly what you're asking for.
brisky
Twitter is centralized platform where people down own their data. We need to think how to make open protocols better in order to improve the decentralized web
g6nhe9twPd66
As if email is any better? Just because you delete all your mail from your inbox, doesn't mean the requisite copies in your sender/recipient inboxes are deleted. Decentralized doesn't necessarily mean data ownership.
brisky
Data ownership is just one aspect. However i don't think twitter is good comparison to email at all. Email is for private communications and twitter is public social network.