Email Required (digital exclusion of people without email)

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This community collects stories, cases and situations where people without email are excluded from society.

This also includes people who have an email account but:

are unwilling to share their email address with the other party (e.g. the other party uses gmail or MS)
the other party’s mail server refuses the senders mail server
the other party’s web form falsely rejects a registrant’s email address validity, perhaps due to weird constraints beyond that of email address RFCs.

Somewhat related:

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(all of Denmark) E-mail required because Danish postal service stops. Germany next? (www.bbc.co.uk)

submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Woah, this is sickening.

unplugged off-gridders fucked
If you live off-grid outside of Denmark, wtf.. what happens to your letter when it is sent to a Danish address in 2026? Will every national postal service worldwide have to negotiate a contract with FedEx? Extra sick: FedEx is a hard-right GOP-supporting ALEC org that ships slave dolphins, hunting trophies, and shark fins. UPS is also an ALEC member. So if you boycott both, then what? Maybe you get lucky and live in a country that does a deal with DHL (assuming they operate in DK).

e-mail is still broken
I sent a critically important time-sensitive e-mail to a Danish landlord. The recipient’s e-mail service accepted my email for delivery, then silently sent it to a spam folder. The asshole dip-shit landlord argued it was my fault they did not receive my email message in their inbox. WTF? How can a sender possibly control what the recipient’s mail server does with a message after the SMTP transaction is over? I was legally screwed because I was expected to be accountable for the action of a server I had no control over. Denmark is not ready for forced-email with this kind of ignorance in play.

I can’t even get a msg accepted by Google and Microsoft mail servers. And I’m happy about that because I boycott those companies anyway.. would not send email to gmail or outlook recipients even if it worked. Hence why I send lots of snail mail and almost no email.

In Denmark, I would be fucked. Glad I left. I think DHL would make my cost of living shoot up even higher amid the housing shit show there.

workaround
Send faxes, for the few recipients who still have fax numbers. It will still typically arrive in the recipient’s email inbox, but there are still some advantages:

delivery is more reliable than pure email because the email segment of the transmission has the same endpoints, thus not much risk of dicey treatment.
the payload is raster dots, thus more effort for surveillance advertiser-operated email services to snoop (doubt they bother with OCR -- but if they do, fine.. let them work for it).
you can send msgs without being forced to reveal an email address to the recipient.

action
Would a few million people outside DK please send a snail mail to a DK address in the 1st week of 2026?

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

We need a reform and a robust way to interact digitally with the government, pay taxes and also send messages etc.

I think that’s nearly impossible. Some people use the Tor network and govs tend to block it. For me, “robust” means being strong enough to handle Tor traffic, but I don’t think anti-Tor ignorance could ever be flushed out.

Some people also use very OLD devices, like myself, and refuse to contribute e-waste to landfills. That crowd is also hard to cater for. For me, “robust” also means working with lynx browser, but I don’t think the chase-the-shiny incompetence of only supporting new devices could ever be flushed out.

So I must ultimately disagree because if the gov were to achieve what they believe is robust, it would be a recipe for ending analog transactions that everyone excluded from their digital systems rely on. They should strive for robustness, but never call it robust. They should recognise that digital tech always excludes some people and so analog systems are still needed.

By the way: If your emails frequently lands in spam folders you should check your mail servers IP if it’s on some spam filter list.

That is exactly the problem. My mail server runs on a residential IP -- deliberately so. My comment stands: it’s naive to make a sender responsible for email landing in a spam folder when the sender has no control or even transparency over the operation of the recipient’s mail server.