Semantic E-mail Delivery: The Future of E-mail?

Stanford has been hard at work at what could be the future of e-mail delivery. Semantic e-mail addressing (or SEAmail, as they call it) allows users to direct a message to people that fulfill certain criteria instead of specific addresses or even names. It’s not imminent so don’t worry about your Gmail just yet but this may be something you’ll hear more about.

"You want to send messages to people or roles, not to strings of characters," [Stanford associate professor Michael Genesereth] says. Semantic technologies are aimed at making just this sort of thing possible. The idea is to create programs that understand context, so that users can interact with the software more naturally.

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sounds kinda interesting, but isnt that kind of the idea behind SIP? bring all of your means of contact into one solution?

Registering with jobserve allowed prospective employers to only let me know about jobs in relevant disciplines.
Now that method is being extended worldwide involving any part of my character?
Can I opt out or do I have to torture scientists?

The second page says a lot in the first sentence, "This technology has clear benefits, but it's also ripe for misuse," does anyone else see this as spammer heaven?

The oversimplicity of this statement had me wondering how they hadn't thought past the fact that there are many people with the same name, "For example, people wanting to send a message to "Michael Genesereth" could simply type his name as a recipient, and his most recent e-mail address would automatically be selected.",so suddenly you've got a bunch of email addresses of people you don't even know...a dilemma for the average person, joy for a spammer. Think about being able to pull up "groups" of people by criteria, just like ads, they'd have a way to target spam (no more women getting penis enlargement pill spam hehe)...they'd have a spamgasm.

Seems to me there could very ell be a privacy issue in all this; what if I don't want the world to know my email address? They had better make a way to control who can "see" your account. or it'll be a much bigger can o' worms than email ever thought of being.

For some reason I don't think calling them "email addresses" would really make sense at that point, maybe "contacts".

Call me a pessimist, but it seems that the scum of the earth always fine a way to turn things with great potential into cesspools with their greed, and once that happens, more time is spent patching than progressing.

Why is this different than a database of contacts with different "roles" ie. John Smith can be in the "Friends" "Brothers" "Siblings" and "Coworkers" roles...just select the role you defined and email everyone associated with it...right?

Or am I missing something?