Sure, but HTTP was started in '97, and yet we've gotten a decent replacement rate towards HTTPS.
It's all about publicity and messaging. We made an explicit, coordinated push to get rid of HTTP. We're still working on it. Think of how many people were/are involved.
We've not had a coordinated push for SMTP. TLS doesn't satisfy anything but a trivial threat and trust model (for secure messaging, when done at the SMTP layer). And that would involve a lot less people if we get it "right" (and it's only a new protocol and not a new app).
If it were up to me (it's not), we'd have a solid technical spec and then try and make this happen. Rather than pushing STARTTLS.
There is kinda a group working on a solution. I don't know what the current status is and what their funding levels are:
Sure, but it seems to me that improving email is more similar to improving email than to improving HTTP. I think the STARTTLS push has gone more slowly than HTTPS for reasons that are fairly fundamental to email - it requires hitting more providers to get decent coverage. Chrome has >60% market share, while GMail is <30%.
It's all about publicity and messaging. We made an explicit, coordinated push to get rid of HTTP. We're still working on it. Think of how many people were/are involved.
We've not had a coordinated push for SMTP. TLS doesn't satisfy anything but a trivial threat and trust model (for secure messaging, when done at the SMTP layer). And that would involve a lot less people if we get it "right" (and it's only a new protocol and not a new app).
If it were up to me (it's not), we'd have a solid technical spec and then try and make this happen. Rather than pushing STARTTLS.
There is kinda a group working on a solution. I don't know what the current status is and what their funding levels are:
https://darkmail.info/
For these purposes, the branding is all wrong. I've not read a recent version of the spec, but there's still commits as of 6 months ago.