How do you flag an email as ‘high importance’?

fwor

Fair comment - the fields exist, anyone can use them, and anyone can ignore them.

I while back I spent a few years working on "a better email system" based on X.400, which would have made these things work properly.

It failed because 1. nobody expects to pay for email now and 2. it wasn't invented in the USA (and possibly also because it was perceived to be too complex).

paddyrg

SMTP was never designed for hostile environments, and was never envisaged for this level of use, which is why we have spam, frankly. So many people have architechted alternatives but the cost and scope of the job of replacing wholesale the comms of the internet is beyond staggering of course, so has to keep back-compatibility. And that is the problem, you keep back-compatibility and that means no momentum towards replacemnt - look how long IPv6 is taking to adopt for instance!

I have never played with X.400 but it is almost certainly a better solution that was just never adopted. Shame!