I don’t get this quote. Why is mail reading considered an obvious forward step for a program? That fad seemed to die with the browser Mozilla (or SeaMonkey these days, if it still exists).

Heh - for the record, that quote is from the guy who's responsible for open-sourcing Netscape into Mozilla, and is from around about that time/era...

These days I wonder if the functional equivalent is expanding to include a Slack-bot?

Facebook expanded until it could send and receive facebook walled garden mail (fb messages).

iOS has iMessage.

Instagram and tinder and snapchat all support the basic concept of “mail”.

In fact, I wonder how many apps I have installed that don’t have some concept of an “inbox” or “messages”. Taskrabbit, Uber, GrubHub - all do “mail” in the modern, unfederated sense of the term.

(email started out unfederated, then we got uucp and smtp, now we are back to unfederated, centralized messaging.)

He also wrote an email client for Netscape.

Email and usenet client - which was the only client that ever got message threading right...

Consider firefox hello -- it died, but it was something they tried to implement/popularize.

I guess it's back from the days when "internet suites" (a huge monolithic app with browser, email, IRC, etc) were still a thing.

Seems like at least one of them is still going: https://www.seamonkey-project.org