@icedquinn I think the problem with email is that its currently not decentralized enough, in part thanks to anti-spam efforts. So you have the big parties like gmail, live, gmx etc etc that whitelist each other, but everything self-hosted will have a hard time not ending up in some kind of spambox.
I am still a fan of XMPP, at least, the idea of XMPP. Because it was a product of the time and relied heavily on XML. And if there is one thing I hate besides Java, its XML.