I am so tired of hearing that email is broken. Mine isn't. It works great. It's faster, more powerful and universal than anything web-based, like Facebook messages. It works on nearly any kind of phone even.

Yes, it's overused: my inbox grows faster than I would like. But not because "email sucks", but because other ways of communication are often inferior. At least I am glad I had stopped emailing links to myself after I found about delicious some time ago.

I like email. Am I the only one?

Ditto. I get about 100,000 spams a month, and on average one spam gets through every other month. Roughly six to eight spams per day go to a borderline folder that I glance at to re-convince myself I'm not missing any false positives. I find spam more amusing than bothersome.

All my legitimate advertising mail gets automatically filtered into a "Commercial" inbox, and mailing lists go to "Lists", both based on the recipient addresses. Companies that send me annoying commercial email get booted to the Spam folder permanently with a single drag-and-drop. All I get in my main inbox is one-to-one mail from real people, notices from my bank, invoices, shipment notifications -- basically only the things I've chosen to receive. My classifier learned very quickly how to identify them, and it rarely needs reeducation.

I have a script that converts all incoming emails to txtspk and sends them as SMSes to my phone within seconds of their being sent to me, in addition to sending the original text to a separate IMAP folder that my phone periodically downloads.

I love my email. I wouldn't mind getting more of it.

Now that I use Gmail, I'm with you. I don't get spam in my inbox. Everything works just as I'd expect.

The problem with email is trust.

ANYONE can leave something in my inbox. Whereas you have to be on my contact list to send me messages over other mediums.

Sure, I can setup filters. But when I exchange business cards, we find each other on Facebook , Twitter, Jabber, etc.

People just don't have an address book that ties into their email as a trusted system.

Find each other on Twitter? Oh Jesus... Have you looked for each other on Grand Theft Auto?

Actually, yes. I used to work on games for Sony. So, I add people on XBox Live and PlayStation Network.

And Twitter is actually valuable based on the people that you follow. A ton of my friends work in the mobile space and push location info to Twitter.

How is it going to prevent spammers from sending athentication requests as spam?

(*) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Repeat after me, kids: SMTP != email. You need MX records, local MTAs, and client protocols (POP, IMAP, proprietary Exchange/Notes/etc.) at least to make a full email stack.

Furthermore, XMPP makes no provision for server-side storage and organization of messages. I for one consider that a huge step backwards, at least in terms of functionality.