The next phase of email should be for Federal and state governments to host it. We need to move it off of private infrastructure for essential services like payments and recordkeeping. There should be better penalties for misuse of email services and scams now that it handles so many important things, including authentication to many sites everyone uses. I wrote a whole rant on this a while back on my blog, despite objections, email can well replace the outdated physical mail delivery systems currently in place around the world, vital communication in the age of corporate surveillance and scams needs to be regulated if not run, regulated, and secured by more accountable government resources.

We have already seen how our personal information can be harvested and weaponized. Leaving important email services to strategically opportunistic companies like Google will not be wise into the future.