Hey,

I've skimmed the messages, because you lot talk *a lot* and so if this
has be brought up before, then apologies.

I think this is something that's been touched on a little bit - and I
wanted to throw this in for group think.

So, there's lots of awesome work trying to rethink the UX of email on
the desktop, and the ideas coming out look really great. I, for one,
can't wait.

But the biggest thing I think that's going to hold all of this back is
the mail protocol, the way messages are handled, stored, transmitted.
So, perhaps this is time to consider a new spec for email? (maybe this
is a side project, based on the work from Letters.app?). This would
mean we'd switch to a more structured format, have better meta data,
more focus on real sender/receiver (lets try and cut spam out) and
something better for managing inboxes -- e.g. what if a mailbox was
really just a git repository?

What if the spec for email actually had a proper structure for virus
and spam scanning? Location data? Organization data? Identity Data?

(it'd be nice to do-away with noisy signatures if that stuff just
happened in the meta data for an email, no?)

I don't know the whole scope for what this would look like, but the
current spec we use for email (RFC 2822) is almost ten years old now,
and in that time, spam has become 90% traffic and hacks have occurred
to describe the provenance and reasoning for the messages we receive.
I think that's kinda lame, and it'd be well worth looking at that
again.

What does that mean for Letters.app?

If people here are interested in this and taking it further, then
perhaps Brent will oblige another list to discuss an 'ideal world'
spec, and we could consider implementing that as the spec between the
data store and letters.app. Heck, it would be fairly simple to modify
postfix or similar to spit out emails formatted this way to applicable
clients. Then, perhaps we can pull a whatwg and push this into the
wider consciousness as a better specification for email.

Or I could be talking to myself. :)

Best,

James Cox
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