Continuing my thoughts on the continued strengths of email, I throw at the following on Twitter and got a a decent amount of interest:

Here’s a (not so) crazy idea: just use email (SMTP + IMAP) as your internal message queue. Need push? IMAP-IDLE. Need fanout? Add more To’s.

— Peter Robinett (@pr1001) July 24, 2012

I think there really might be actually something to this. Email as system is very well-understood and the clients and servers are quite optimized. I have to say, I’m tempted to whip up a proof-of-concept!