Email is broken and ugly. We are constantly trying to bend email to be a useful productivity tool - to me the idea of filtering emails by text found in the subject for example as a way of organizing/categorizing emails demonstrates just one of the sheer inadequacies of email.

Email is also incredibly insecure, how many people have sent emails to the wrong people? you mistype an email address, or select the wrong 'John Smith' from the address book and you've just sent top-secret confidential files outside of the company walls.

Attaching files should be a thing of the past, we should simply reference files within email text - again, much better for security because only authorized people will actually be able to access the files, rather than with attachements where all recipients (even erroneous recipients) can a). view the document, and b). very easily distribute the document to unauthorized persons.

I am astonished that corporations continue to use email as the basis for internal communication.

I really hoped that Google Wave could have killed email - or at least replaced gmail with something more useful. However, the failure of Google Wave demonstrates again that Google are not 'inventive' - they just take existing ideas/products and improve on them. shame.

...maybe the people that replace email with something appropriate will be the next Google...