How about building a solution (or a possible solution)?

I think it is fair to guess that many people reading this have achieved some level of success building solutions to technology problems. Much like solving for malicious use for the average user with 2FA - or privacy with things like protonmail - why shouldn't some of us attempt to solve this rather than expect/complain that Google hasn't?

Mail hosting isn't particularly expensive - companies like mxroute are sub $1 per GB per year with deliverability, etc taken care of - or at least well enough to make it better than constantly changing addresses.

I know that I personally would be willing to invest time and non-trivial amounts of money to offer a solution and gauge adoption and feedback.

Some opinions (open to feedback!) on where to start:

1. Use existing mail provider from the start - mxroute looks like a possibility

2. Overprovision storage by some reasonable factor - say 1GB accounts with 10x overprovisioning - interested to hear from those who know more than me about this but I wonder if more unhoused/homeless people generally use email for mostly transactional purposes not 20mb JPEGs, etc.

3. Ensure the webmail interface (possibly build it) is Ultra simple and Super accessible - screen readers, text to speech, and of course mobile first. Again I (perhaps naively) imagine that features like tagging, rich content composing, and filtering are super low priority here.

4. Have a sign up flow that is mildly fraud resistant - mobile number verification (VoIP not accepted) with a cool off before it can be used for another account (how often do Obamaphone numbers rotate/deactivate once stolen?) and an (accessible) captcha type system to avoid mass sign ups. This could then in V2 be expanded to include more corner cases - possibly invites in lieu of phone numbers, etc. If fraud/spam became an issue it should be easy to detect given these will generally be low volume users.

5. Require only a modestly secure password for login. Use malicious use detection to trigger recovery/verification mode (see next).

6. Have a recovery/verification mode that fits the user group - need ideas here - but 5 questions that you have to answer 4 of and have some verification that the answers are not just simple words at setup? Combine that with verify with a real (but possibly different) mobile (non-VOIP) number that hasn't been used in X days to verify another account? Trusted friend recovery address? Seems like lots of possible solutions to explore here, and no doubt lots of people smarter then me who could provided ideas.

Is there interest in doing this? Am I the only one that feels frustrated when we (including myself) debate what google should do, or why people are unhoused (or what to call people how are) when many of us are capable and financially able to at least try to offer a solution?

With 500k-1M homeless/unhoused in the US (no reason it couldn't be international, just starting somewhere) - let's say it was crazy successful and had a 10% adoption rate of actual active usage. Maybe that's 7.5 TB of storage. I'm sure a reputable provider would be willing to partner to provide that at $1/gb/year or less (plus hosting webmail, etc) - I'd be willing to pay that bill personally for that kind of adoption/benefit. Would others? Would others dedicate their time?

Homelessness is multifaceted - that seems to be the one thing everyone agrees on - so offering possible solutions to any given facet - from fragmented communications to safe shelter - is at least a start and possibly a small part of making a difficult life situation a little easier to overcome/deal with.

user:	errorik
created:	October 7, 2022
karma:	1