Here is an idea for something that has been in my head for some time. All that would be required to jumpstart the innovation process is a developer-friendly AP

Here is an idea for something that has been in my head for some time. All that would be required to jumpstart the innovation process is a developer-friendly API and standardised events for extending email: onReceive(headers, body); onOpen(...); onTagged(...); ... That would allow developers to do creative things with email. It may even give way to niceties such as: npm install email-itinerary-parser These events could be standardised across the board. A plugin ecosystem would allow emails to operate much like blogging platforms do today. You could have a self-hosted email platform with a plugin dashboard where you would pick and choose your plugins. The UI would be the hard part but is a tractable problem given the state of client-side MVC libraries that didn't exist until a few years ago. A service like Akismet would provide SPAM filtering and other services could be built around it. The trust factor would be an issue but it might be even possible to send these services only extrapolated data instead of the entire contents of the email. It would even be possible to build atypical interfaces around your email. You could for example build a blogs UI that shows all emails sent to myname+blogs@mydomain.com. The blogs Controller could automatically reply to that email with the published status. In general, things could move in a progressive direction much faster in the hands of the developer community.