There has been a lot of recent discussion, both here and elsewhere, as to the potential for RSS to replace email. Jon Udell chimes in:

There’s been a lot of talk about replacing email with RSS. I don’t buy it. Although I am a huge fan of RSS, and expect it to largely replace email for subscription-related purposes (e.g., mailing lists), I don’t see it as a general solution for ad-hoc person-to-person communication. Nor do I buy the argument that we need to toss SMTP. Obviously, we need to use it in a slightly different way. Of the various proposals floating around, the RMX idea — a DNS-based solution that enables a receiving mail server to verify whether the sender’s IP address is authorized to send from the domain within the sender’s address — seems particularly interesting. (I mentioned RMX in the Canning Spam article last month.) But it would be nuts to throw out the SMTP baby with the spam bathwater, and I’d be really surprised if that were to happen.

I agree with Jon’s assessment. Email is used for too many things including newsletters, discussion lists, knowledge management and file swapping to name a few. Certainly RSS is a better tool for some of these, but email is not without it’s appropriate uses. The reports of its death are premature.