Oh why thank you. And your proposed solution is what?

You completely discount the biggest problem with replacing e-mail with anything: 90% of the people on the internet don't know diddly. And those same 90% don't want anything to change. They spent lots of time and effort just to get to understand e-mail, and they don't want to have to learn something new.

And then there's the old "we have to dump the old standard wholesale and get the entire world to change all at once for this to work" problem. The same problem that keeps IPv6 from being widely adopted, after more than 10 years of trying.

Another problem that you haven't forseen, is that for all its insecurity, SMTP is no less hacker proof than whatever you propose to replace it with. SSH is not hacker proof either. People can be persuaded to give up their SSL keys, there are man-in-the-middle attacks, there are weak passwords.

The fact of the matter is that there will always be spam as long as there is a huge financial incentive to spam. And the nature of computers means that mass-mailings will always be extremely cheap.

In short, what you propose is a technical solution to a social problem. Forget it. You may as well try to stop burglary by encrypting the numbers on your door.

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