New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Should the government provide email to its citizen?

Ask HN: Should the government provide email to its citizen?
5 by nathan_phoenix | 5 comments on Hacker News.
In this day and age email is basically a necessity. To use any online service (and increasingly common for offline ones) an email address is required at the minimum. Currently those are provided by private corporations. But will, or even should, governments step in and offer this service to their citizens just like with regular mail? Came to this idea thinking about the development of the postal service and immediately thought of it as a natural continuation/evolution, but the more I think the more gotchas I see with it. Like what to use as the email identifier (people change names and places, random number are hard to remember, etc), how to stop bad actors from spamming everyone, what if someone uses it to send objectionable content, etc.

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