I believe that one of the reasons for the lack of innovation in the email space is the lack of a simple yet powerful email access protocol. Every developer that wants to try something with email needs to first jump through the hoops of IMAP and MIME, or worse, the Outlook Object Model and MAPI. A new protocol like reMAP would lift this burden off their shoulders. We've seen what open, simple standards can do for innovation with Twitter's and Flickr's API. Now imagine unleashing the same sort of creativity to the vast ocean of data that is email.

Web apps that generate and host personal information are providing that information to apps via OAuth. Email - on of the key datatypes of personal information - is still only accessible via non HTTP protocol. It is time for a change.

I suspect that Google re-hiring Gabor (and killing reMail in the process) has a lot to do with this vision.