Document: WM-083 P. Webb Category: Computing 2026-02-15 Neue Email Abstract Why hasn’t something better come along yet? Body The future of computing interactions is not a chat interface. Email is not irrelevant. Desktops aren’t going away. It’s reductive to look at current successes in tech and declare the current way of doing things is gonna disappear in 5 years. Remember NFTs? I have a lot of them collecting digital dust on an external drive somewhere. Weren’t they supposed to make everyone rich? Empower gamers to own in-game cosmetics and pave the way for Ready Player One IRL? Change the way art ownership is democratized and experienced? SIGH. I wish they took off, it was cool tech and I discovered amazing artists. Anyway. That being said, I love and hate email (does this segue make sense?). _Love_ thinking about it, **hate** dealing with it. Self-hosting is fine after you get it working but hoo boy, what a drag. Ideally, the world should be signing their emails with GPG keys but only serious nerds do that. Idk about you, but I’ve sent and received approximately ONE GPG-signed email in my 20+ years of computing and that was a few months ago (a guy wrote about domains as internet handles[1] and I have thoughts/solution[2]). Email is great because it stuck. Not sure it ever had competition at its inception. The warts on it have congealed into something you can touch but you feel gross doing so. Security is tacked on, the various specs tying SMTP, DKIM, SPF, DMARC, &c are ancient and loosely followed by the behemoths in the tech industry. Gmail is great because people don’t have to think about email! In fact, one of the coolest email apps is ACTUALLY a Gmail client[3]. That’s embarrassing. But, Gmail is a sensible API atop something so archaic and complicated that most people don’t want to touch. I’ve had at least a half dozen half starts with creating IMAP clients and it occurred to me recently that the specs gross me out. There’s just too much unpleasantry to deal with. In the years since the inception of email, we’ve witnessed an explosion of messaging apps/systems; WhatsApp, Signal, Discord, Matrix/Element, Telegram, Snapchat, the list goes on. What a lot of these have in common is built-in security and avail-/reachability controls. Why can’t email? Wait a minute, what if email was invented today, what would it look like? Most importantly, what would it be called and how would it be referenced? As much as I love Kagi, no one is ever saying, "just Kagi it." Neeva, the search engine I used prior to Kagi, had the same issue. "Queree"[4] (query) on the other hand, works (shameless plug). I gave Claude a list of grievances and it spat out a spec[5][6] for other LLMs to process. We’re humans though so I’ll walk y’all through the Inbox Protocol. Nice name, right? "Just Inbox me" works well. High-level, this is a secure and async messaging system boasting E2EE (end-to-end encryption), reactions, and edits. Table stakes, right? Here's what I'm thinking for managing spam: 1. sender authentication via Dap[2] 2. economic resistance in the form of an API[7] for HTTP 402 Even though both of these are projects of mine, there’s absolutely no requirement to use them, you could use standard DNS and roll your own HTTP 402 API. Actually, a future update to the spec will replace them with generic terms. Coupled with aliases the economic resistance could be powerful. Take for instance, `paul@webb.page`; I could make it so unsolicitated senders would need to pay $3 to get their message sent to me, unless I already had them on my allowlist. `newsletter@webb.page` would have no such paywall. No more paying for LinkedIn’s InMail when you could just inbox someone directly. So know some of you DNS nerds might wonder, "how the hell are you gonna make discoverability happen? Clients need to find servers and whatnot!" `SRV` and `TXT` records. I’ll figure out the rest later. 🕸️ References [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [6]