I would like to put the Idea here in the forum to remove the requirement to need an E-Mail address to use the core TTN functionality.
Why: E-Mail providers go more and more in the direction to force their users to enter as much private information as possible and scrape the E-Mails the users get to collect as much data as possible.
There are privacy respecting services who already removed the need to enter an e-mail address like some Matrix chat servers. Also old communication services like IRC was always usable without E-Mail.
The only single thing TTN users loose when they do not enter a E-Mail address is should be the ability to recover a lost password. If they want the password recovery function they can optionally enter a E-Mail address. If this would create spam in the forum here, then also make the forum access dependent to having to enter the E-Mail address.
LoRaWAN is great technology that can be used in a privacy respecting way. When internet services tend to go in the wrong direction and make their customers and the customer data the money value of their company they could sell at any time they want, there should be things out there that keep up with the freedom of the users.
I do not have to enter a E-Mail address anywhere to communicate with other people using the same LoRa chips when i use Meshtastic 
Lost password?
Notifications?
Accountability?
Point of contact?
Service updates?
I cant understand your grievance at all, nobody is forced to do anything - your signing up for a free sandbox service and at its most basic level an email address is just a point of contact.
Which is a technology that is used for a totally different purpose. LoRaWAN is not about communicating with people but transmitting infrequent sensor readings.
Your e-mail is required to contact you in case of issues. Or when there are breaking changes. If you donāt provide any contact means that wonāt work. And donāt suggest youāll be reading the forum on a daily basis to get information because there are very very very few users that do so.
@ealw I would draw your attention to this page
https://www.thethingsnetwork.org/community
(Also check out the TTN Manifesto).
This site overall (not just the Forum) is about not only the technology - LoRaWAN and its underpinnings - but also is about working together as a Community. That means building together, helping each other, sharing and collaborating. Whilst I agree with your comments and concerns wrt big tech sucking up as much data and personal info as possible and monitizing that and the fact this seems to be an accelerating problem in recent years, my experience is that that has broadly not been the case in the ~10 years that TTN has been up and running - anniversay this year! 
WE as a community need ways to communicate with other parties within the community and as part of the eco-system surrounding it. It can be fulfilling and a source of joy to get a request (often notified through email) from a fellow Forumite or Community user, or even just someone considering using the solution, asking for help or asking assistance with a project or problem, and even more so from people reaching out (oh how I hate that term!) with an offer to help, to collaborate, or even just offering a site for Community GW deployment.
If you want to use the technology in a āprivateā manner (as in solo and away from the TTN Community) then go ahead and do so - TTI and the TTN Foundation even make that easy for you by providing TTS as an open source offering (ok without some of the frills and ease of use features/integrations etc. that come with being part of the Community instantiation). Spin up your own version on your own servers and go for it! (
Donāt think you even need to give yourself an email address!).
If you want to work with others and build this together then go ahead and crack on using the TTN Community implementation (TTS (Sandbox)) and join us as we collaborate and shareā¦
Over the last ~7-8 years on TTN I have lost count of the number of times I have had to reach out to other community users to seek assistance with deployments or issues arrising, to ask users to be considerate in their use of the shared resources (abuse isnt common but needs to be managed when it occurs - users often do not realise when their device or GW is a problemā¦its only when they get that nudge email we get a āooops sorry didnt mean to do thatā or āI didnt knowāā¦) Many times we find e.g a rogue SC/DCPF disrupting local GW service and need to ask the owner to stop/or change (in some cases I even offered - via that important email address! - to swap out for a full LoRaWAN GW), and sometimes I see users/potential users with an interesting or challenging use case, deployment need or end (usually community driven) benefit and think right I will contact them (via their linked email) to offer support - advice, development assist, loan, demo or permanent devices or even giving away free GWās for good locations that can benefit the Communities I support and sponsor, or even help start new Communitiesā¦ no email, no assist and no offerā¦ no communications (or atleast more challenging).
Note: none of us have access to your email details - it is all handled and masked (for privacy!!!) through the TTI/TTN systems. If you choose to share email details with others (either by open posting or via a PM/DM, discussion at a conference/TTI/TTN event, during a webinar or online training session that is entirely your choiceā¦you dont have to but you can if you wish.
Lets build the Community and help build this thing togetherā¦ 
Apart from all of the above, thereās a huge point lost on you because you have only just joined and that is that we donāt get to decide. We can request. We can plead. We can try nagging. But the design & running of TTN is based on how TTI want TTS to work.
We donāt enter personal data that is of the slightest bit of use to TTI, except all the ramblings on this forum. Nor is it very realistic for them to capture the ~250 uplinks processed per second to try to ferret out any information of actual tangible value in quantity, assuming they have the time to figure out the payload formats.
If anyone is worried about their data being sensitive, then it is only available in a decrypted format in memory for a few ms whilst it is sent to the integrations that are setup, all of which use or can use an encrypted message. If they are truly concerned, they can encrypt the payload on the device and decrypt once it is in their own system.
But I digress, the point being is that TTN is not FaceAche or TakTik or SnowChamp or whatevers. There is insufficient personal data for any targeted advertising and, as you may have noticed, no actual advertising either and all the datas are secure almost all the time and are mostly meaningless & pointless. If the NSA want to identify the up turn in power consumption by an additionally deployed gateway near High Wycombe then they can see it on TTN Mapper but the reality is the data is probably how soggy a compost heap is, as thatās the sort of data we pass around via battery powered long range radio. Very occasionally I may send a spy met balloon that transmits pictures & location, but there is usually a tasty cake attached, again, of limited interest to anyone other than about 200+ media outlets world wide and ESA astronauts.
There is also a school of thought that says itās best to hang out for a few days or weeks and find out how things are & work before submitting a proposal. You can do this by submitting an issue on GitHub - it will help your case if you can offer up a few tens of thousands of ā¬/Ā£/$ to pay for the amendments to the enterprise software, subsequent testing & migration. Or you could do the changes and submit a PR.
To ensure your journey to implementation of a solution is as smooth as possible, please take time to read the Learn section. Please also be aware that LoRaWAN has several specification documents and is recognised by the ITU as a standard. LW was not designed for non-technical users so there are a few moving parts to get to grips with & many layers of detail. We can explain the how & why and ideas on LW implementation & extension are good to debate, but what exists is relied on by millions of devices so isnāt going to see a radical overhaul - a good example Iām regularly asked is why a JoinEUI - because it allows for a Join server - which allows you to hold your own encryption keys so that data passing through the TTN Network Servers isnāt decrypted before being passed on to you. This is more corporate and people occasionally trip up with JoinEUIs when they just have a few device, but itās in the spec and isnāt feasible to remove it.
If you remain concerned about the use of email addresses, there are many different services that can proxy them for you. Or you can setup one on a privacy focused service like ProtonMail for free. Or you can run your own copy of TTS on a server (good luck finding a service that doesnāt need your email address).
@ealw And of course whilst precise location for GW deployment is a nice to have and a personal preference for any given GW owner, many users deploy with a small amount of dither/offset on the location shown for security and/or privacy reasons - whilst many of mine show actual location many have a 20-50m sometimes up to 100m offset (FYI Helium allow up to 150m on their network but then they try to monetize their GWās directly through Mining) so any tea leaves (sorry, thieves!) wont know exactly where to find (or the NSA for that matter, though they have the RF direction finding kit to track down if they really wanted to!) - was more an issue when GWās cost $1500 vs today <<$150
These are some interesting answers. I do not fully understand why i got many of those because they go in a different direction then the intended forum post and idea.
The usage of TTN for the person i know who told me about TTN is the same like mine. I think the most of the TTN people use it this way. I just want to record for example temperature and humidity for some time and have a look at the data when i like to.
When some time passed and i am interested how the values have been the last days or weeks, then i enter a username and password and can see those.
I already answered this question in my first post in this topic. Lost password is my issue. When i lost my username and password, then i can never look again at the data. I should not loose things if i want to keep those. If i for example loose 10 bucks of money on the street, then i am also not complaining. When i loose something, then its my problem and not the problem of someone else.
If i want password recovery functionality, then i enter the optional email address.
Not interested. If i want email notifications, i enter a optional email address.
? For my temperature data ?
What contract? I do not want a ācontractā like its known and used by companies you own money because you for example got a car you have not payed the price for.
If the service shut down, then its closed. Its the same like all those closed source smart home crap things. When service shuts down, then everything is gone and the smart home thing does not work and is e-waste when there is no one who create a open source alternative that can run with other servers.
I do not want to have to get any service updates. If i visit the website and the website is gone, then its like always and also my data i had there is gone. If i want service updates, then i enter the optional e-mail address.
Yes, i see that.
But i do not want to get contacted. I just want to login and check the data of the temperature in the last days.
I do not need that. When there are issues, i would see them when i try to login and for example the data is gone, the website is gone or something else like that. Then its how it is. If i like to get contacted, i would have entered in the optional field a email address.
The person who told me about TTN is not doing anything at the Community. He just have a sensor and from time to time he login and check the data. That is everything he is about.
He is also not working with other and not building something. He have just a device that sends data he checks from time to time.
Its not about you. I see this have been misunderstood.
TTN is not the ābig techā that is collecting my data to sell it i hope. I just do not want to send those data to a e-mail service provider. There is completely no need for. Its my temperature of my place. Why should i get forced to tell any e-mail provider even that i am using TTN/LoRaWAN and put that company at the place where its able to recover a password they do not know and then login into the account. This is completely negative and not positive. I do not want to collect temperature data of my place and then give an e-mail company the ability to access it.
This is the normal procedure in a free and open source mindset. For example on github its the most normal thing that you ājoinā with a PullRequest. The code matters. Not you as a person. Its a idea someone (or in the future maybe also something AI based) is providing. Github have already the Ai based dependabot that is adding useful things to the code of many projects.
But LoRaWAN itself is not the servers the data goes to. Its just the communication specification that does not require any e-mail address.
Its not a single point about TTN/TTI infrastructure itself what i wrote in the first post. Its just the requirement to have to enter a e-mail address and then a company that is running this e-mail service is getting from there on the information the user behind this e-mail address is using TTN. There should be by design no need for a company/community to force their users to also tell a e-mail company anything about his temperature of his place.
Its not about money. Its about data having to be send to a different company that is running an e-mail service.
Compare it like a meal you order. I am not asking for some extra ingredients i do not want to pay extra for. I am telling: please make the onions optional because only people who like onions should also have to have them in their meal. At the moment you are forcing everyone to eat the onions if they like them or not for no reason.
No problem - that is what the Integrations are there for TTN will show instant/very recent values only (whilst browser window open and potentially values still cached in system if session still valid)
Not on TTN you wont, sorry. As above values are instant/recent not long term, if you turn on Storage Integration you can get a few hours worth buffered for recovery of any data missed in your Integration, but that is hours not days/weeks, and a nice to have not a guaranteed serviceā¦ (See Learn section etc. per Nick)
That is what you are deliberately sending and provided it follows TTN FUP then no issueā¦ but all too often we see devices abusing update rate, asking for confirmed downlinks, consuming too much with confirmed updates, batteries or PSU or embedded formware that behaves strangely such that device goes e.g. into a repeated join request mode, never capturing/accepting and basically spamming the system, etc. we (or rather TTI core team) need some way to contact and say āoi you have a problemā or āoi stop!ā (or if it is really bad and your device starts to breach not only TTN FUP but any associated locally legally enforced RF regulations they may need to assist the local authorities with contact details so they can get you to stop, or moreā¦! 
It was Contact not Contract!
As aboveā¦
And that is fineā¦ Iām sure many of the 150-200k+ users are also freeloading and if you dont want to play nice as community member and he/you just want to take that is fine also (within FUP limits)ā¦ the entry ticket is a valid email address! If you want to use for free and not contribute then go to Git pull the open source version as you seem keen on
Then you can run on your own servers without anyone knowing anything and with no contact detailsā¦also perhaps given your concern about your email service provider knowing stuff about you and what you do (suspect that may be more of your problem here!) given
Perhaps you use that same server to run your own email server imlementation (lots out there including open-source implementations!)
The sensor data that you get through an Integration or see when viewing the TTN Console is never sent via email so no issue there (and web browser view should be on encrypted TLS session (https)), with payloads also sent to Integration typically via encrypted/authenticated links (with encrypted payload per Nick - decrypting and decoding on your own application server or your chosed dashboard of choiceā¦yes you can decode on TTN if appropriate and pass clear readings, but again these decoded values would be passed over encrypted/authenticated paths to chosen Integration destination, surely?!)
As above how/why would they see that?!
Indeed but not just the servers it goes to but goes through and those responsible need a contact pointā¦LoRaWAN as a communication mechanism get you from sensor through a media convertor (the GW!) into a (typically IP) standard internet message protocol and onward to the LNS with all the associated wrappers, headers, metadata etc. that need to be handled as part of the LoRaWAN protocol and and structured under the typical LoRaWAN system architectureā¦where it goes after that is your choice and decision. Note TTN uses LoRaWAN but is not LoRaWAN, LoRaWAN is used by TTN but it is not TTN, TTN is far more than just the protocol or even the system architecureā¦
As I say I suspect your beef is with your choice of email service provider! And what you say is irrelevant wrt actually using and parsing data from/via TTN.
If you want the meal just as you like it then ultimate option is cook yourself (see TTS(OS) on GIT) : what you are compaining about is like walking into a supermarket and picking up a pre-made jar of Bolognese Sauce for your supper then complaining to the shop that you want a version (just for you?!) that doesnt have onions in itā¦ dont want onions?; cook it your self or choose a different sauce that doesnt include onions. Want a free/low cost LoRaWAN Network offering without email - look for another or cook one up yourself, brutal perhaps but thats how it is right now, sorry.
Yes, you have right.
- Use you own mail server. From 2008 itās very easy to have a server for incoming e-mails. Sending is another story. You can set up a raspi.
- Use a donation / free mail service from disroot.org or others like www.autistici.org without tracking. I have tested only disroot for a brief period.
Thanks @clv for noting those service providers. Yes, they are in summary better then the other typical ones.
But that is still not the idea from the first post. I am not in search of who is the best e-mail provider i should send TTN information to. I am providing the idea here to the community to not be forced to have to send any information to any e-mail provider. In most use cases where TTN is been used for, there is just no logical need to inform a e-mail provider about the usage of TTN by someone who just want to measure the temperature or humidity of something.
Donāt worry you are not the 1stā¦TTN has been around for near 10 years and many of us have discussed on Forum, on PM/DM, email exchanges (yes the service provider might know!!!) in webinars and at F2F events such as TTConf, Meet-ups, TTN/LoRaWAN Hackathons & Teach-Ins, etc.
Conclusion was nice idea but not a real issue and had potential downsides such as those outlined above not least
as above
If you are so paranoid about what your email service provider might know/glean/infere then you need to address that through other routes (perhaps as above!) and wrt
Again see all the discussion aboveā¦for the reasons outlined many others (and most importantly by those who are in control and make the implementation decisions vs individuals in the community; including users here on the Forum and even those of us who act as moderators - we have no direct account access and no direct control over how things get done/implemented!) think it is deemed that there are logical needs, though you are welcome to your opinion. (I would point out that in the early days under TTN V2 contacting others was a lot easier as the early centralised NOC and the map/community presentation of e.g. GW data made it a lot easier to identify GW owners by contact through username that was then relayed out by TTN/TTI via that all important email address, it is a lot less transparent these days - potentially to the detriment of the āCommunityā aspect.)
At this point I would say opinion noted, but any further discussion is moot and is starting to look/feel a bit like baiting/trollingā¦ though I will leave that to other Mods to judge given my direct engagement in this thread!
No you canāt because TTN doesnāt store that information - which highlights the knowledge gap here.
I have seen / see many many versions of open source. This is not that. TTS is the published source version that you can contribute to, but the final design is in the hands of TTI as itās their party. There is no debate on here that will enforce a change to TTS, any proposal has to fit in with the scheme TTI have in mind.
And when you join a forum you join a community and propose a material change to the community when youāve only just joined is like asking someone to marry them after five minutes in to a date. Too soon!
This is relevant how?
I was inoculating you against proposing any changes to the way that LoRaWAN works as that is even more futile than proposing changes to the identification services for TTS.
This perspective is somewhat lost in translation from your original post. Setup your own mail server or use a privacy forward one as I suggested above.
But as with the uplinks per second, most email providers donāt have time or capacity to sniff at emails - Google being the main exception - but I doubt you use them!
Whilst strictly correct, there are benefits to the vast majority of users in being contactable by some relatively direct means.
However the only emails youāll get from the stack or the forum will be entirely self-generated. There isnāt an email that contains such information that can be sent from servers. In fact I donāt think there are any actual emails unless I want to do a password reset. But very definitely none that say what you are doing with TTN or measuring or reading or some such. And you can easily turn off the forum emails.
You appear to have taken up a cause that I canāt imagine many people ever really thought of as an issue. It so totally never crossed my mind but then I have a VPS that runs both incoming & fully accredited outgoing mail - DKIM, SPF & DMARC - using commonly available instructions. Linode $5/month server is more than sufficient to run such things.
As @Jeff-UK suggests, this seems like a fruitless crusade - anyone whoās worried their email provider might find out they are using TTN can do something about that with a number of means outlined above.
Perhaps keep your powder dry (aka credibility intact) so that if any actual technical issues arise, we donāt just glide on past fearing some left-field questions.
Thanks for your answers. Its great to have such overview how TTN is been organized in the background. This help a lot to understand why things are like they are.
@Jeff-UK
Your message was not there when i answered the message from @clv . It appeared somehow before the message from @clv and also before my answer. Its looking now if i had ignored that message, that is why i write that.
About the main idea:
This
and this
just make the discussion from the view of getting this implemented not beneficial. Thanks for letting me know that. I pressed the Solution button at @Jeff-UK because he mentioned that first.
I know that the idea does not make sense from a company view especially when their idea is to send you a bill whenever possible. That is why platforms that have already implemented this idea are in general always some non-profit organizations.
Because people are spending their own money and setting up Gateways to provide other people access to this service, i was thinking this idea could be implemented when some of the people here like it. But it does not matter if you like it or not, because its the company decision and not the community.
The e-mail provider have more power at the TTN account then you on your own. The e-mail company can just send a password reset request, then they set a password they want and thats it. Your e-mail account is gone and your TTN account is also gone. This is not something hypothetical. Companies often take over the account of their users. The companies think, that what the customer does on their servers is theirs and not from the cusomer.
This is really not something special or something rare. Here a example from Oracle where they took over the account form the customer and logged into his account and looked around. The customer who was paying money was not able to access the account any more.
Ironically one of the most common posts on here & Slack is people struggling with password resets - Iāve not tried it of late because I canāt fix the problem if I mess it up, but last I heard it was still a convoluted mess of which website where, when & how. People leave an organisation and their colleagues ten canāt get in because theyāve deleted the previous persons account. Iām just glad thereās no 2FA as I can never remember which phone to use for which Authenticator app for an account.
And as my main email address is from 1994, it gets a bit silted up, so overall, we do need to find a better way.
Anyway, I hope your adventures with RadioLib is going well - donāt forget @CaptainAwesomeās ReadMe in the Starter folder!
So I was spot on. Your (right) idea is for privacy, for big data and intrusion. You can set up an email server with this box (just an example). Itās almost free. Less than 100ā¬ to have REAL private email for all of your life / family. You only pay for your internet connection.