Honestly I think email needs to be rethought from the ground up, just a whole new protocol with a killer app to get it going. Some of the most salient uses/qua

Honestly I think email needs to be rethought from the ground up, just a whole new protocol with a killer app to get it going. Some of the most salient uses/qualities of email: - Asynchronous communication - Decentralized / Federated - Identity Issues: - Spam - Lack of room for the format to expand - Identification verification is hard My ideal replacement for email would look something like a decentralized/federated identity protocol with default whitelist for contact upon which you build out data formats for sharing. One key spam reduction technique in a federated system is to realize that most legitimate interactions are with people and services you are already in contact with so it’s better to make initial connections harder to improve the quality of daily use. Another tool that works decently in a decentralized system is introductions/vouching. Eg. you can ask mutual contacts to connect you or at larger scale you can entrust third party services to “vouch” for a user, similar to how certs work. If a vouching service does a poor job of vetting who it lets through than users will stop trusting it.