Recently making the rounds is a nice article on how email hasn’t evolved along with how people use it. He makes some good points and all in a very nice looking package, but he confuses one key thing: email and email programs are two different things. The issues van Schneider outlines are all with email programs (and many of the issues are actually mitigated in many email interfaces, including Gmail). Email as a protocol, however, is quite powerful and often underestimated. From multipart MIME messages to email headers (Message-ID, In-Reply-To, etc) there are a lot of simple, standard elements of email that can be used to build very powerful mailing services and, yes, email programs.