[nkassis]

I think people are looking at it the wrong way, it's not problems with email it's the fact that email is flexible, decentralized, reliable that makes it possible to use it for any of these tasks.

The asynchronous messaging that email provides is it's killer feature that would need to exist for any of the features (todo,task management,calendering...) that you mention would need to work well. But the underlying mechanism of email is still working fine and I don't think that should change.

I agree with the article, the client is where this should go with maybe some thing similar to the W3C and Browser vendors (This isn't perfect but it works) agreeing to protocols.