Internet messaging (email) faces a variety of challenges not envisioned in its original design. Efforts have been made to compensate for limitations in security, flexibility, and integration within the existing standards and software base, but many aspects of these objectives can be obtained more easily from a fresh design. A fresh design will be easier to deploy if it is based on an emerging suite of high-level standards. In this work we explore the idea of redesigning email as a family of web services, an approach we call WSEmail. Existing standards and software for web services provide a high-level foundation with many of the desired properties. We illustrate a design, some sample applications, steps toward a theoretical foundation for its security, and an implementation. Our prototype illustrates a number of useful features: messages secured under federated identities, flexible treatment of access control, ondemand attachments, semantic routing, modular extensibility, and integration with instant messaging.