I don't think people want to change email addresses very often. How do I know Mozilla will still be doing this in 5-10 years? (Edit: Others have pointed out that, if we can bring our own domains, technical users can retain their address. However, for non-technical users that's not an option.)
Also, I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start (except for TB contributors) and providing a free tier later - reverse of the usual way of launching a product. Maybe this is a soft launch to shake out the bugs and build a little momentum, and you can pay if you want to take part?
Mozilla could do something awesome here. I hate to say it, but here is a chance to start fresh and make big, legacy-breaking changes to Thunderbird. The new audience - which should become the vast majority if they are successful - won't care if it's not like the old Thunderbird (possibly unlike many on HN). Here is a chance to do something special and the mail client is all most users see or understand.
> I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start and providing a free tier later
I think this is a smart move. Email isn't a platform where you need to conquer the world to be successful. Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model. Might as well serve the paying customers first and build up revenue.
Also, whenever you're launching something new, you generally need to limit onboarding. Google did it with Gmail, Bluesky did it with their service. You can't have a flood of 10 million new users all at once before you've had a chance to scale things. Seems reasonable to let paying users in first given that email doesn't have network lock-in effects.
I think there is reasonable skepticism around how committed Mozilla is to this. However, I think that starting with the paid tiers is a smart move given that they'd have to limit signups initially anyway.
That happened to me, but fortunately it didn't end up being a huge deal.
I had forgotten to renew my domain from Gandi, it expired, and I stopped getting emails. I also could not find my password for Gandi, and I couldn't get the password reset to work, so I panicked, but fortunately Gandi will let you renew someone else's domain. Not a transfer, just if account A wants to pay to renew account B's domain without any change of ownership, they allowed that, so I made a quick throwaway account, and renewed everything for eight years.
Credit cards have expiry dates, or at least they do over here. I expect my partners domain to expire 10 years after my death, as I can only pay 10 years in advance. To many people, there are more important things to worry about (and often second thoughts after the fact).
Hate to say, but might actually be a legitimate use case for blockchain here. Identity provider which is responsible for being a source of truth on aliveness tied to a smart contract for paying annual registrar fees.
Though the traditional way would just be finding a registrar which can direct debit (e.g. CSC Global or MarkMonitor) or setting up a trust account for someone to manage it for you. Or just power of attorney plus escrowed account.
A promise of money in the future is worth less than getting this money now. Present value (PV) here would be - how much you would pay now to get $X after T time.
Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + ā¦ converges even though the series is infinite. Look up āperpetual bondsā.
The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].
Source: I work in a bank but Iām also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.
I agree, although if a business decides to close a service could it get tricky? What if all other providers charge much more and the provider can't sell your domain on to them to manage? Or they sell it on to an unscrupulous provider? A yearly fee means they can't get all the cash up front and then run.
Weāre talking about the cost to save a <1KiB database record. The only reason this doesnāt exist is that the entire TLD ecosystem is a rent seeking enterprise.
If you buy someone's domain name, then they'll probably have emails going to it. So you set up a catchall address and discover what accounts are related to it, then you can use the reset password functionality to get access to the accounts. In some cases, they'll have a backup gmail account - and perhaps you can guess what it is (e.g. emails come through to Paul Davis so you guess, oh, maybe they have the paul.davis google account, and reset password on that).
If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.
Never go for ccTLDs for anything critical, since you're practically at the whims of the government controlling it (see: .af ccTLD that the Taliban took over)
The British Indian Ocean Territories (.io) might go to control of Mauritius. They will be able to decide what to do with the TLD. It could in principle be restricted to residents, or go away entirely.
> It could in principle be restricted to residents, or go away entirely.
If the UK loses control of it, I'd put most of my betting money on Option 3: The new owners extort everyone with a .io domain for a rate proportional to the perceived value. In other words, $50K a year for a successful tech company, $1000 a year for the average joe who doesn't want to lose control of a domain tied to 1,000 accounts.
I bought the tombert.com domain about eleven years ago, forgot to renew it, GoDaddy auctioned it off and a squatter sat on it, and they wanted $1800 for it back, which of course I wasn't going to pay for my dumb internet alias. I tried calling the squatter and offered to pay them $200, and they said that maybe they could setting for $1000, but this domain is in "really high demand" so they can't go lower than that.
I would occasionally check it, and the price would vary by hundreds of dollars, but never a price I was willing to pay. Eventually I think it lapsed again and was picked up by some Chinese site that (I think) was trying to sell massages.
Finally, in 2021, I guess they got tired of paying for it, and it fully lapsed, and I was able to purchase it, so I bought it for ten years.
I hope for the best but plan for the worst:
I don't think people want to change email addresses very often. How do I know Mozilla will still be doing this in 5-10 years? (Edit: Others have pointed out that, if we can bring our own domains, technical users can retain their address. However, for non-technical users that's not an option.)
Also, I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start (except for TB contributors) and providing a free tier later - reverse of the usual way of launching a product. Maybe this is a soft launch to shake out the bugs and build a little momentum, and you can pay if you want to take part?
Mozilla could do something awesome here. I hate to say it, but here is a chance to start fresh and make big, legacy-breaking changes to Thunderbird. The new audience - which should become the vast majority if they are successful - won't care if it's not like the old Thunderbird (possibly unlike many on HN). Here is a chance to do something special and the mail client is all most users see or understand.
> I'm not sure about charging a fee at the start and providing a free tier later
I think this is a smart move. Email isn't a platform where you need to conquer the world to be successful. Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model. Might as well serve the paying customers first and build up revenue.
Also, whenever you're launching something new, you generally need to limit onboarding. Google did it with Gmail, Bluesky did it with their service. You can't have a flood of 10 million new users all at once before you've had a chance to scale things. Seems reasonable to let paying users in first given that email doesn't have network lock-in effects.
I think there is reasonable skepticism around how committed Mozilla is to this. However, I think that starting with the paid tiers is a smart move given that they'd have to limit signups initially anyway.
I think it shows real maturity to take this approach and makes me feel more comfortable that they'll be sustainable.
> Hey has been doing great business with an only-paid model.
[citation needed]
From the perspective of an end user, I subscribe to hey, have done so since public launch, and I am quite happy with it.
Plus when I'm paying I know that I'm the customer, not the product.
> I don't think people want to change email addresses very often.
You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain. Then they can change provider without changing the address.
> You probably know this already, but people should have their own domain.
Until they forget or unable to renew. And then their PII is in the hands of the person who gets the domain.
That happened to me, but fortunately it didn't end up being a huge deal.
I had forgotten to renew my domain from Gandi, it expired, and I stopped getting emails. I also could not find my password for Gandi, and I couldn't get the password reset to work, so I panicked, but fortunately Gandi will let you renew someone else's domain. Not a transfer, just if account A wants to pay to renew account B's domain without any change of ownership, they allowed that, so I made a quick throwaway account, and renewed everything for eight years.
I mean, sure, but I and probably 99% of other folks have a credit card set up to autorenew. This is a security problem, but not a very serious one.
Credit cards have expiry dates, or at least they do over here. I expect my partners domain to expire 10 years after my death, as I can only pay 10 years in advance. To many people, there are more important things to worry about (and often second thoughts after the fact).
Why hasnāt anyone made a TLD with infinite expiration?
The price should just be the present value of the annual fee cash flows.
Hate to say, but might actually be a legitimate use case for blockchain here. Identity provider which is responsible for being a source of truth on aliveness tied to a smart contract for paying annual registrar fees.
Though the traditional way would just be finding a registrar which can direct debit (e.g. CSC Global or MarkMonitor) or setting up a trust account for someone to manage it for you. Or just power of attorney plus escrowed account.
I donāt get it, example?
A promise of money in the future is worth less than getting this money now. Present value (PV) here would be - how much you would pay now to get $X after T time.
Turns out that sum of PV($X in 1 year) + PV($X in 2 years) + ā¦ converges even though the series is infinite. Look up āperpetual bondsā.
The value of $10 paid annually forever is probably $200-500 depending on [things].
Source: I work in a bank but Iām also shit at finance so take this with a large grain of salt.
I agree, although if a business decides to close a service could it get tricky? What if all other providers charge much more and the provider can't sell your domain on to them to manage? Or they sell it on to an unscrupulous provider? A yearly fee means they can't get all the cash up front and then run.
Weāre talking about the cost to save a <1KiB database record. The only reason this doesnāt exist is that the entire TLD ecosystem is a rent seeking enterprise.
But this would only converge if you assume the fees will stay fixed or at least grow more slowly than the discount rate.
Taking over a domain is not particularly connected to access to PII.
You own/control the name, not the set of files on a hosting service somewhere.
If you buy someone's domain name, then they'll probably have emails going to it. So you set up a catchall address and discover what accounts are related to it, then you can use the reset password functionality to get access to the accounts. In some cases, they'll have a backup gmail account - and perhaps you can guess what it is (e.g. emails come through to Paul Davis so you guess, oh, maybe they have the paul.davis google account, and reset password on that).
But if someone else gets the name, they get your email going forward, and therefore access to a lot of your accounts.
If you're going to buy a domain for this, don't get fancy with the TLD. I made the mistake of choosing a .io domain for this purpose and with the future of the TLD uncertain, I have been moving away from it, so I'm not left in a bad spot if things go sideways.
Never go for ccTLDs for anything critical, since you're practically at the whims of the government controlling it (see: .af ccTLD that the Taliban took over)
One exception is the country you actually live in, then a local TLD wins you at least a more reasonable way to go to court.
Yeah even sensible looking decisions can backfire. Am in the UK. Had to scrap my .eu domain due to brexit.
wait what? Is .io going away?
I have a .app domain for my email, and have had it since like 2018. Now I'm wondering if that was a mistake.
.io is the ccTLD for Chagos Islands.
UK will give sovereignty of Chagos Islands to Mauritius.
There is a mixed history of what happens to the ccTLD in such cases.
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41729526
The British Indian Ocean Territories (.io) might go to control of Mauritius. They will be able to decide what to do with the TLD. It could in principle be restricted to residents, or go away entirely.
> It could in principle be restricted to residents, or go away entirely.
If the UK loses control of it, I'd put most of my betting money on Option 3: The new owners extort everyone with a .io domain for a rate proportional to the perceived value. In other words, $50K a year for a successful tech company, $1000 a year for the average joe who doesn't want to lose control of a domain tied to 1,000 accounts.
The average Joe with an io domain is probably a developer happier to code up a migration than be extorted so dearly.
I bought the tombert.com domain about eleven years ago, forgot to renew it, GoDaddy auctioned it off and a squatter sat on it, and they wanted $1800 for it back, which of course I wasn't going to pay for my dumb internet alias. I tried calling the squatter and offered to pay them $200, and they said that maybe they could setting for $1000, but this domain is in "really high demand" so they can't go lower than that.
I would occasionally check it, and the price would vary by hundreds of dollars, but never a price I was willing to pay. Eventually I think it lapsed again and was picked up by some Chinese site that (I think) was trying to sell massages.
Finally, in 2021, I guess they got tired of paying for it, and it fully lapsed, and I was able to purchase it, so I bought it for ten years.
People should, but is the existing process simple enough even any laymen can do is the question.
To be fair, most people I know that are competent to do it just don't. So there is probably another reason, like "people can't be arsed to do it".
The average person is not intelligent enough to have their own domain.