A non-technical friend of mine uses her computer for web access and email. She has been a CompuServe customer for several years. Her computer is running Microsoft Windows98 and has a telephone modem. Every time she connects to the Internet she is bombarded with several annoying pop-up windows that she didn't ask for. These pop-ups can be simply considered "bad service" from the Internet service provider (ISP). An obvious response would be that she should simply switch to an ISP that doesn't bother her with pop-ups. The problem is that all of her friends and colleagues all over the world will continue to send email to her at her present address, hername@cs.com. If she leaves CompuServe, she will lose her email address. Of course, no ISP is going to forward your mail after you leave. Leaving Compuserve would be almost equivalent to abandoning her online identity. So she is in an unfortunate situation of not having control of an important aspect of her online identity, her email address. It is quite simple actually: hername@cs.com is within the portion of the email namespace that is owned by CompuServe. One extreme response would be to say that everyone should have their own domain. Then she could just use commodity generic Internet dialup access. My friend could purchase hername.com and pay for hosting of her domain. Then she would own and control her online identity. But it will cost her money to register the domain and have it hosted. Furthermore, we can't all have nice short domain names. hername.com is already taken. So having her own domain is not practical. We need benevolent email redirectors. A trusted, permanent domain could give out email accounts. I own w140.com. I can give out email accounts to all of my friends. So my friend can be myfriend@w140.com. I could configure the mail server for w140.com to forward this mail to myfriend@some-isp.com. The problem is that I am not reliable enough. The trusted redirector should probably be a nonprofit organization with some kind of fund to keep it going for a long time.

I believe that it is important to keep Internet connectivity and naming separate. Of course the ISPs don't want their users to have that freedom. You can see this in their policies regarding outgoing mail. Many ISPs will not relay your outgoing mail if the From line of the header doesn't have your email address in their domain. This blocks the simplest and most painless way that users can maintain separation of naming from Internet connectivity. One easy way to keep these things separate is by using a webmail service like Yahoo or Hotmail. This could be OK if you really trust that these companies will be your loyal provider of high-quality, free service forever. (Yes, most people want to keep their email addresses forever, which is a long time in any world, particularly on the Internet.) But still, in 2003, host-based email programs are much superior to webmail systems. So the ISPs give their users the choice of the comfortable slavery of accepting an email address of the form username@isp.com or the hassle of webmail, with all of its restrictions on inbox size, etc... I should mention, however, that there are ISPs that do not have this greedy tactic of only passing mail that uses their email addresses. I think that Earthlink allows you to send outgoing mail with any "from" address.