it's also wasteful in a different way: a lot of effort put towards building on top of a remarkably bad pseudonymous protocol based on anachronistic trust assump

it's also wasteful in a different way: a lot of effort put towards building on top of a remarkably bad pseudonymous protocol based on anachronistic trust assumptions from that point of view the refactoring to do is separating identification from transport and storage/lookup - for these things there are very good solutions but there is no cohesive protocol that is solid and widely adopted, and it's unclear if that will happen anytime soon, or ever - rather than just doing away with the mail metaphor in favour of the pager+answerphone metaphor which can be seen as a total overlap as you add features but you're right that since email is here now and it "works" now, especially from a social perspective, then it makes sense to free up people from silos - what effectively webmail and proprietary messaging/social media are - and perhaps the best way is the toolkit approach you describe which would go about email a bit like git did with version control: establish protocols for the separate aspects of the system and then provide the user with a supervisor command tool, which can be automated to some particular use cases if need be but is flexible enough that it doesn't require one particular setup