Holding our email hostage by David Reed

Holding our email hostage by David Reed Any sensible design would be working hard on creating an identity system at the edges. It may be that the SMTP transport will self-destruct by failing to provide connectivity sufficient to be useful, in which case, the smart money would best be placed on providing an alternative, universal internet that doesn't try to understand identitiy at all, surrounded by better email clients that understand identity, because they deal directly with users and authenticate users on an end-to-end basis. It's easy to kill spam in such a system, and since the spam warriors are about to kill the present system, it'll have to be ready for the refugees.

I think he's right - we need to use digital signatures for ID, but we won't until Mail clients make this automatic.