Email might be the most popular application on the internet, but it is an aging standard that has serious flaws. It's time to take a look at email's strengths and weaknesses, as well as borrow from the strengths of IM, wiki, and web forums, and forge a new internet communications standard.

--Communications Standards--
Email- Ubiquitous but aging.
IM- More nimble than email, but ephemeral.
Wikis- editable and centralized, but cryptic mark up language and web only.
Forums- Centralized and persistent but web only and bulky.
--Research--
http://www.im2000.org/ -IM2000: a proposed email standard that I recently discovered that comes to many of the conclusions that I reached independently. No usable implementations have been created using this standard.
http://www.openspf.org/ -email standard to reduce address spoofing
http://www.feed-mail.com/ -feedmail: Email over RSS. Not public as of Jan 2007.
http://www.jabber.org -jabber/xmpp is a robust communications standard that I plan to extend for my implementations.
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0136.html -this proposed xmpp extension has a lot of functionality that would be useful to me, but it\'s unlikely that it will be ratified in time. Still, it\'s heartening to see that others are thinking in the same direction.

The Zipwire strives to be simple enough for a casual internet user to understand, but robust enough for daily use by everyone.

I plan to use the ITP listserve as my testing ground. I will rapid prototype a client for this singular purpose. The next implementations will be able to send documents to other addresses, connect to websites, and include embeddable attachments.