There's little need to nationalize, since emails don't have a last-mile or natural monopoly issue.
I think, however, that modern countries should provide all citizens with an official, public, mail address. Restrict them to only send/receive emails to/from a whitelist of publicly registered service providers with very strict personal data governance requirements (government, banks, utilities, medical services, higher education).
You can let private companies continue to offer email addresses for everything else, anonymously and under whatever terms. (Much like how you can still buy a mailbox if you want, but you're always guaranteed to receive the mail at your address.) Just ensure that people aren't cut off from essential services.
Good idea which will work for most people, however it'll be an issue for dissidents or people moving countries. Those can use some other provider, while everyone else (99%?) can be covered by this solution.
I guess there should be a provision against gov services making it mandatory for people to use the gov provided email.
A government that would punish dissidents by locking them out of bank accounts etc. can already do so by extrajudicially freezing their bank accounts in the first place (looking at you, Canada).
In my view those email address should be strictly national and reserved for national-level services, so whenever you move to another country you should get a new email address at the same time as you get a tax ID number.
> The addresses that appear as firstname.lastname@eesti.ee (for example, mariann.mustikamets@eesti.ee) or companyname@eesti.ee (worldsbestransport@eesti.ee) can be used for private correspondence, while it is not part of the public mailbox service. Emails sent to these addresses are not saved in the person's public mailbox but are forwarded to the personal email address they've specified in the Eesti.ee portal (Gmail, Hotmail etc. accounts).
And:
> The decision does not concern people's official personalcode@eesti.ee addresses that can only be used by state agencies.
The latter, which was not discontinued, seems to be closer to what your parent comment was suggesting.
...Why default to restricting to a whitelist? If the government is giving you an email address, you should be able to use that as your only email address, that you use for talking with friends and family, etc.
If someone's abusing the privilege, then there can be restrictions added.
Inbox restrictions: because otherwise every single service ever will start accepting only official government emails to sign up, killing anonymity on the internet (and clogging your official mailbox with not-quite-spam).
Outbox restrictions: because otherwise every citizen who gets a bit of malware on one of their devices will start sending spam and get (temporarily) restricted, and the whole point is to have a reliable address that you know the citizen cannot lose access to. Also because it would be real weird if you could send messages to addresses that cannot reply to you because of the inbox whitelist.
I think, however, that modern countries should provide all citizens with an official, public, mail address. Restrict them to only send/receive emails to/from a whitelist of publicly registered service providers with very strict personal data governance requirements (government, banks, utilities, medical services, higher education).
You can let private companies continue to offer email addresses for everything else, anonymously and under whatever terms. (Much like how you can still buy a mailbox if you want, but you're always guaranteed to receive the mail at your address.) Just ensure that people aren't cut off from essential services.