Internet Mail 2000. Regarding the Andy Oram piece I linked to yesterday -- Let's Get Rid of Electronic Mail Once and for All -- reader Michael Richards comments, "There's work on this type of thing happening. It seems to be moving slow but could be great if it's ever implemented. Oram didn't mention one of the biggest problems with email which ties right in with the rest of what he discussed... spam [good point! -ev]. The new work addresses that quite well." And directs us to something called Internet Mail 2000 (who's name would suggest that they are a little behind schedule), which tackles the problem by flipping it around: "Each message is stored under the sender's disk quota at the sender's ISP. ISPs accept messages only from authorized local users. The sender's ISP, rather than the receiver's ISP, is the always-online post office from which the receiver picks up the message. The message isn't copied to a separate outgoing mail queue. The sender's archive is the outgoing mail queue." Changing how a huge, installed, decentralized system works by completely reinventing it is always a difficult way to go, of course. But is sounds like an interesting experiment.