"I really am at a loss to think of something that email as a standard (and SMTP as a protocol) is lacking that requires a replacement." Scrap push and go pull,

"I really am at a loss to think of something that email as a standard (and SMTP as a protocol) is lacking that requires a replacement." Scrap push and go pull, every destination I send to is just a personalized RSS feed I create and you can poll it or not. You want to connect with unknown people, post to a mailing list. Or people can push you a pull request which you're free to ignore. If you want something a little less ambitious, how about mandatory cryptographic authentication as a 100% requirement, no downgrading and not optional. You wanna be in the new network you will have a real (not self signed) CA issued key and you will have a keyserver with all your users valid keys in them or we aren't accepting any mail from you or your supposed users. This isn't so much new tech with new code as issuing whips and chains to the sysadmins to enforce common sense. Want something even simpler, I assume the only reason gmail doesn't do locale / charset filtering is a patent, but if not, it seems blindingly obvious that if I don't read Korean you could filter out anything containing more than 10% Korean glyphs or entire words. This is so obvious, the reason gmail doesn't provide it today must be a patent. It would be funny if "inbox" means literal inbox as in a remake of that "scan and email" postal mail provider but they get around postal regulations by living in a civilized .gov or by not handling mail (they eat interoffice paper spam, which is admittedly a dying product, I haven't gotten a genuine paper memo in many years) Perhaps if you recall the anecdote from snow crash where the fedgov employee had her email reading habits tracked in detail, they could sell this to HR for sending HR-spam.