This idea seems so simple, I’d have to believe it’s been tried before. In fact searching (using unscatter.com of course) I found http://www.bigstring.com/ which has the core idea in place already.

The idea being that you send an email, but the recipient gets a link to the email and not the actual email. This allows the sender to go and edit or even delete the email after sending it. It would also allow a lot more functionality. Read receipts wouldn’t be dependent on the client supporting them and the recipient agreeing to send it.

The mail messages themselves could become interactive, inline chat within the email that preserves all communication. Collaborative editing of content, similar to what systems like Google Docs allows now.

Basically it would allow email to become to communication protocol for a better collaborative platform. With email so heavily used, adoption of it by users should become a lot simpler. Also, with email clients like Thunderbird and Outlook having plugin ability, support for more functionality directly within the email client itself should be possible by supplying a basic API server side. I’d of course likely have to write the plugins as well to start.

I’m considering when I’m done with the rewrite I’m working on for www.unscatter.com developing mail.unscatter.com to see if I can put something like this together. I am curious if anyone has feedback on the idea? I’m sure I’m not the first one to have thought of this.

Edit: A couple people have given me some good food for thought on Hacker News about this. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2886631

Starting to lean towards marketing this as a collaboration platform that uses email as a form of delivery/discovery, and could then expand it to use other platforms such as Twitter as well. Would mean the collaboration features would need to be top notch. A lot to think about. Glad I made this post as the feedback has been interesting so far.