I think it’s the best all-in-one PIM out there (does anybody use that term anymore?), but it’s far from perfect.

I’m pretty sure people do still say PIM, yes. At least, I can’t think of a different and more common term that replaced it. And you’re quite right in your assessment of it.

If this theoretical new system is just as insecure and easily spoofed as the current one, then charging would never work.

Not really. Most of the spam, right now, is not sent because SMTP servers accept everything without authentication. Some of them do, sure, but not nearly as much as in the past, and the percentage by now is small.
The problem is compromised personal computers, “zombie” computers if you want.
Once a user has their computer compromised by a program made by a spammer, that program could do whatever the regular email/messaging program can do, including using the messaging program’s credentials and authenticated connection.
The ways to solve this problem are to make the computer/OS more secure, which is an entirely different matter altogether. The security of the messaging protocol, SMTP or otherwise, isn’t really the issue. And if we can make OS secure, preventing all this spyware/adware/”spamware” crap from running, that will drastically reduce spam over SMTP as well.

But I think if you put an economic incentive in to stopping the spam, that might help.

Of course it would help. Does help. Some of the (not good enough, obviously) anti-spam measures today exist because someone hoped to make money of them.
But if you’re talking about increasing the costs of sending spam, I don’t really see it as a viable option. The only way is, like you suggested, to have a price per sent message. But that won’t help, since spammers will just use other people’s message-sending capabilities. And it will extremely and drastically limit the usefulness people get from the ability to freely send messages.

You’d also get the problem of either creating a single strong world-wide monopoly to control this, not a good idea and probably not possible, or have some level of entry for competition, in which case you’ll get players who are not as good at it or who are less hard on spammers. It’s not a technology problem.

Again, I don’t think we necessarily need to abandon the specialized interfaces for an all-in-one solution; it’d just be nice to have the option. We’re moving there anyway naturally, I think.

Yes, that’s going to happen. And probably regardless of whether there would be another new messaging standard or not. More and more programs are trying to integrate other messaging standards than they were developed to support originally.

Oh, they all have that. Outlook often completely breaks down when its pst file (The file containing ALL the folders together, not just an individual folder) reaches 2GB.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not holding Outlook up as the paragon of all e-mail clients. I think it’s the best all-in-one PIM out there (does anybody use that term anymore?), but it’s far from perfect.

That one has been discussed in the past, and is not a good idea.

Seems like your objections are largely based on today’s current, craptaculous SMTP mail. If this theoretical new system is just as insecure and easily spoofed as the current one, then charging would never work. But I think if you put an economic incentive in to stopping the spam, that might help.

I really really really don’t want to pass a CAPTCHA on each and every message I’m sending

Oh, I quite agree with you there, Yaron. I just meant CAPTCHAs when you sign up for the service, plus maybe a random check once every couple weeks when you sign in.

What? No, wait. We have that today.
you can create hyperlinks with FTP locations. It works.

I think you misunderstood me here. I’m saying that the World Wide Web was the solution to what people did in the old days, FTPing documents back and forth all the time. As for writing down the IP addresses… I guess domain name servers came along well before web browsers, so I was combining two innovations into one here.

That’s a matter of taste, but I, well, like it.
Specialized interfaces almost always do better than a one-size-fits-all solution.

Again, I don’t think we necessarily need to abandon the specialized interfaces for an all-in-one solution; it’d just be nice to have the option. We’re moving there anyway naturally, I think.

You wrote:

Mozilla has also brought on David Ascher of ActiveState to launch “a new mail and communications software initiative.” What exactly does that mean? Well, it’s not clear. Apparently Mozilla is skimping on paying their PR people too.

What that means isn’t unclear in the slightest. There have been many postings by Mitchell, the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and a board member of the Mozilla Foundation on this. I suggest reading her blog and that of other people as this has all been discussed quite heavily recently. (See http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/mitchell/). You could read David’s blog as well at http://ascher.ca/blog/.

The Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit entity. It owns the Mozilla Corporation that is a normal company (in the sense of being for profit) with the foundation as its shareholder. MoCo, as we call it, puts out Firefox and Thunderbird. After much public discussion over the last few months, MoFo (the foundation) announced that it was creating a new company, codenamed “MailCo” at the moment, for Thunderbird. This spins off Thunderbird to sink or swim on its own. MoFo is seeding this company with a few million dollars and David Ascher was hired from ActiveState, which has been building an IDE using Mozilla technologies for a while, to be the CEO of MailCo.

Scott and David Bienvenu have decided that even though they will continue to contribute to Thunderbird (it is an open source project after all), they want to leave Mozilla, presumably to form their own company. This changes nothing about the creation of MailCo or the spinning off of Thunderbird. The stuff on Slashdot is FUD.

As to whether Thunderbird has changed a lot since 1.5, the answer is “yes.” I’ll be catty and point out that the version number increment by .5 or 1 numbers in software for major changes normally. Now that TB is going off to find its way, I would actually expect quite a bit more development on it. Most of MoCo’s development resources have been spent on Firefox in the past. That is part of why this change was seen to be necessary.