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

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