Turkey wants to give each of its 70 million citizens an email address (opens in new tab)

I have two initial responses.

First of all, this is pretty cool. It really turns email into something more than it is in other areas, and seems like it would be a step forward for Turkey...

...on the other hand, I kind of like the anonymity of email. I'm not sure I'd like government issued email addresses, either.

So, really, I'm not sure how good or bad this is. Interesting, at the very least.

This raises an interesting question (I'm sure not for the first time): We seem to take physical post as being secure in the sense that if someone tampers with it we can detect it quite easily. However we worry about people snooping in on our emails without us knowing.

Does such a technology/service exist that allows us to detect as easily whether someone has "opened" our email? I'm thinking an email sent to the recipient with a one-time use embedded link (and password maybe) pointing to the actual message somewhere on a server. I guess this would let you detect if anyone else has read your message beforehand. It doesn't mitigate someone tapping your internet connection.

Sounds like a classic security problem involving bob, alice and eve....