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Coming up with a new standard isn't that hard. You just need a couple guys who know the problems and the various proposed solutions to sit down and hammer it out. It then goes through a review process where the community finds out where it's weaknesses are and whatnot, and eventually it gets published as an RFC.
From there, it takes people a while to actually implement it. But it's not the mammoth task you're talking about. Just look at LDAP. Should someone come up with a sender-verified mail protocol that was accepted industry-wide, we could have the whole community adopting it in 5 or so years. There'd be a period where people would use both the old combination of SMTP and POP3/IMAP as well as the new protocols, but the old way would just whither on the vine. Who wouldn't want an e-mail account that was spam and spoof proof?
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