I've hated e-mail with a passion ever since I had to run a server for it back in the dot-com boom. Anyone else who's played with SendMail or Exchange can probably sympathize: e-mail is ancient, poorly designed and prone to all manners of issues. Perhaps the worst part about this antiquated system is that it's also the most commonly used digital business tool in this day and age, and yet the systems designed to work with it are still confusing and oftentimes tough to deal with.

Clearly, this is the thinking behind the much ballyhooed Google Wave. I'm definitely a Kool-Aid drinker there, but I fully realize that Wave is a long ways off and won't likely kill e-mail outright.

But the reason I bring all of this up is to highlight an interesting project from Zed Shaw: Project Lamson. Zed had the same experiences we've all had with e-mail: He was sick of writing code to fix broken old software, just to make sure the nightly mailing lists were working. As we all know, troubleshooting the e-mail server can be the most high-profile way to anger a company's staff.

So, Zed decided to write an e-mail server in Python. Along the way, he's discovered a few areas of remaining confusion, and he is attempting to solve them. The big one that caught my eye was his idea to change all e-mails touching his server into UTF-8.

I still get messages from my client asking if I am sure I want to send out a UTF-8 e-mail before I send it. Is this really necessary? Are there mail servers out there that don't understand this? Shaw is gambling that there aren't. If you want to help him, take a gander at his UTF-8 conversion code and offer some suggestions for optimization and stability.

Unfortunately, e-mail will probably still exist 100 years from now. It's a terrible system, sadly, and the added confusion of everyone's individual e-mail policies will make sure that it remains completely broken for years to come. With all the wonderful e-mail retention policies mandated by the government and the SEC, not to mention the propensity for most institutions to give their users around 100 megabytes of e-mail space on the server, is just one of the wonderfully convoluted points of contradiction in this system.

But thankfully, I'm not the only one completely fed up with e-mail. Thanks to Google and Shaw, and many other intrepid developers, e-mail isn't being ignored to rot on the vine.