| "replace" is a strong word exactly the word I intended to use: but "sooner or later" can be a long time coming. I know POP still exists, hell, gopher still exists but I'd say it's been replaced in all practical terms. every provider that supports IMAP still has to support POP3 In what sense - do you mean practically, or in some technical way? for a new protocol to replace SMTP or even augment it, it would have to be designed, refined... Right, but I restricted this to client-server. Any protocol you like can replace SMTP for client-server, simply by taking messages from the client, then sending them on via SMTP. This is how Courier provides mail sending via IMAP connections. maybe it's the rate of change in things like HTML and CSS over the past few years that gives the false impression of being so easy to do. It's not easy, and it won't be quick. But I like many slow, difficult things, I expect it to happen at some point. In fact there's already a draft RFC to for RESTful HTTP mail retrieval: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dusseault-httpmail-00 |