[dredmorbius]

I've been using email since the 1980s.

I've ... seen a lot of poorly-considered proposals to fix it.

The fact that email has one hell of a lot of lock-in does not mean that it's not-broken. Just that it happens to be in one hell of a local optimum from which reaching any preferable state has a lot of hill-climbing to do.

Much in the way that evolution is not teleological, and cannot identify some desired state it wishes to evolve toward, but must proceed, by stepwise incremental increases in fitness to another state, so it is with protocols and standards.

That's not to say that SMTP + fiddly bits doesn't solve some problems, occasionally elegantly. But the leap from there to "it's not as broken" is ... rather large.

I've read TFA and am going through comments to this thread. There are some ideas I like, some I question. I'd suggest that this proposal seems better though through than many others I've seen.