Hello. I just arrived to your list, and reviewed your contributions.
I come to inform you about my Trust-forum project which is now about to
release (to sourceforge, under LGPL licence) a version ready for use in
the coming month. (The demo installation you can see now is still only a
beta test version, that will be modified and corrected before release).
It aims to provide a replacement of the email protocol by a more
convenient system of web-based private forums : see the documentation
describing how to use it at http://spoirier.lautre.net/en/userdoc.htm
and a more technical description of the general features and goals of the
project at http://spoirier.lautre.net/trustedforum.html
It looks to me that it satisfies already most of the user requirements you
listed, and some other requirements could also come to be satisfied by
some more or less straightforward developments from it.
Let me review some main possible exceptions from your list
http://www.cs.utk.edu/~moore/opinions/user-visible-email-ng-goals.html
"Recipients want to be able to read mail without the senders of messages
knowing that they've read their mail"
Not presently like this because I focused on an explicit advantage to do
otherwise (possibility to modify or delete message without a trace as long
as it stays unread by the recipient) but if really some user needs this it
could be developed also.
"Users want to be notified immediately when they have new mail"
Well, not presently like this either but could be implemented also, to
work provided that the user is browsing the web in an authenticated way:
we could program things so that his home account sent the site he's
browsing a signal to display on top of the window or a popup telling him
he has a new message. Of course, if we made new internet functions to
develop this project the warning could become immediate (I think of such
warnings now already in use with some instant messagings systems, I don't
know how it works or could be adapted here...)
"access their email via a variety of devices"
Well, not yet ;-)
For now, my solution is purely web-based and thus, at least in its present
form, cannot be handled offline nor by other devices unable to access the
web.
Ironically, my message formats are still only text/plain and not yet
text/html, but of course developments here should come soon (as I plan to
include soon a wiki style of web pages, I can probably arrange to reuse
such a format for forum messages).
I saw that such an idea of using web forums as a replacement for email was
mentioned in your message 00585 and replied to in 00588 saying about
webmails that "one problem today is efficiency". What do you mean ? That
the slow connection induces delay when going from one web page to another
? But, aren't we discussing here about projects for the future, when
computers will run still more quickly and high bandwith connections will
be widespread ?
Or what other lack of efficiency are you considering ?
So I expect your feedback on my proposal.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvain Poirier