One of the biggest failures of SMTP (email) is the ability to spoof the sender, i.e. repudiation. I’m a firm believer in the ongoing death of email.
But I see there is still room for improvement. DKIM, DomainKeys Identified Mail (just covered by NetworkWorld), appears to use DNS-stored keys and signed mail using those public keys to verify the sender of email. This will only be as strong as private keys are kept private, the IT techs don’t fudge their mail server configs, and a fake signature can’t be imbedded into the mail and pass any checks (email clients [or MTAs] will have to flag fake ones, since us humans certainly can’t tell).
I had no idea about DKIM until today, but it definitely sounds like a move in the right direction. Will it save SMTP? That I don’t know, but it should certainly reinvigorate it in the business world. I do plan to work DKIM into what I do, but it will only be after/during my email server overhaul/migration from a Windows app to Postfix (most likely).