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Something like an iMessage of mail.

Surely there’s an RFC for that right?

I've always thought about just making a chat client app using email as the underlying standard. Strip out CSS and signatures (and funnel spam/marketing to a separate UI) and bam, you have possibly the most widely-interoperable chat client ever made.

The ostensible "problem" with this would probably be "email is too slow for real-time chat!" But really, how much difference does a few seconds make? And modern connections/tech make me think that idea might have to be reevaluated anyways.

It wouldn't be a business but I could see such an app becoming quite popular.

Something like https://delta.chat/ ? There was also a project/protocol called Chat-over-IMAP (COI): https://github.com/coi-dev/coi-specs

> I've always thought about just making a chat client app using email as the underlying standard.

I'm happy to report that this already exists: https://delta.chat/

> Surely there’s an RFC for that right?

Indeed, there is: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9078

It's used by Delta Chat (IM over email).

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