> Email provides ubiquitous, traceable, asynchronous, storable messaging. Until something can entirely supplant it I don't see it disappearing anytime soon.

Long live email. Anything that replaces it will probably be a closed proprietary protocol and I don't look forward to that at all.

I've often wondered: what's preventing someone from building an IM client on top of e-mail? While it's very inefficient for short messages, we're not using dial-up anymore (and I'd argue it wouldn't be that bad even on dial-up). Furthermore, e-mail could serve as only the slow, max-compatibility path, with some fast path (IMAP public folders? Or even a completely unrelated protocol) when the users are using compatible clients.

Okay, so I guess the idea is not so much IM-over-e-mail, but rather a schema that maps IM operations into e-mail operations.

I've had this thought very often, and (using your comment as motivation) I think I might use this weekend as an opportunity to try hacking something together. Maybe even add SMS fallback using Twilio or something.

Exactly. It's almost as if workplaces matter the most, go figure.

why is that good news?