Indeed. How one achieves such a fresh start is unclear.
G+, Facebook, etc. There's no shortage of fresh starts in the
personal communication space. They just don't typically look like
typical SMTP/rfc822 email. And of course, they substitute central
control for a distributed key model.
Let's try to avoid that line of thinking quickly:
1. Starting fresh means ceasing to interoperate (well) with Internet
Mail. We had quite a lot of exemplars of this when the Internet was
starting to be commercial; semantics matching was often awkward.
2. UI differences can be important but they do not change
interoperable semantics (or formats). And no matter what internal
formats a site uses, if it is to interoperate with Internet Mail with
high resolution in the semantics, it's conforming to rfc822/2822/5322.
3. There are a number of features already available in email
standards that might be relevant to this topic, but they haven't gained
much adoption. So they were 'thought of' and even 'made possible' but
the market chose not to pursue them. Encapsulating a forwarded message
in a MIME body-part is such an example; indeed, some MUAs do provide
that option, though users typically don't take advantage of it.
d/
ps. All of this is no doubt entertaining, but the original comment was
about history, not about starting fresh. My response was posted about
that history.
pps. An example of getting the "fresh start" idea fundamentally wrong is
with efforts to define IPv6-based email as having different semantics
from IPv4, rather than as the transparent extension it needs to be.
--
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net