Vishnu's Pages

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:

  1. Every single email address under this standard should be verified — people, businesses, and organizations alike.
  2. It should be verified using a national ID, by a government-level authority.
  3. 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:

  1. Allow signing up only with a verified email address.
  2. Receive mail only from verified email addresses.
  3. Show a UI that neatly separates emails by category, with preset filters and a folder hierarchy to group mail from different businesses and services.
  4. Still allow sending to unverified addresses and allow receiving from it only in that email thread as an exception.
  5. 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.