Email is great because it's very simple, robust, easy to understand for users, and platform agnostic. I don't think it should be replaced. I do think that the

Email is great because it's very simple, robust, easy to understand for users, and platform agnostic. I don't think it should be replaced. I do think that the tools around email are insufficient though. GMail improved email usage, but the bigger problem with email is still spam (which is only solved by machine learning, and never 100% solved). I wonder if IMAP could be improved. I wonder if there could be a system that uses cryptography to remove spammers from the equation, like an automated voting system, but I'm no expert. A solution might be to build a distributed database of digital signature, which would be make account creation a little more tedious. I guess you could call this a "signature whitelist". Your account would be made worthy the longer it is in use. Another thing I'd like to have is more interoperability between GSM/SMS and email. For example I'd love to be able to receive a text message once I receive an email labeled "important" in my gmail. The one thing that would greatly help users, is to let automated email label itself as not being sent from an human.