i am still of the opinion, if they would extend sieve quite a bit and standardize markdown/reST/asciidoc as rendered in emailreaders, we could probably get much more usage of mail again

(sieve would need additional features of sending/processing mails and reencrypting imho)

but mail is still less broken then mobile phone networks.

Yes. And we'd also need people to stop demanding non-semantic hard wrapping at 79/80 chars.