I've been reading a lot about e-mail being broken. I think people who are claiming this, either don't have the right tools or else are not using them correctly. I have no problems at all with my e-mail. I get a few thousand e-mails a day. Most come from mailing lists, other personal mail, and then random other mails. A combination of procmail and Spam Assassin keep my mail well organized. Just about all my mailing lists are thrown in to folders, all the spam is removed in to a spam folder, and anything else ends up in my Inbox.
I probably get 200-300 spam e-mails a day. Probably 5-10 of those end up in my Inbox. This means that 95% of spam is being correctly identified by Spam Assassin. Between the rules provided by the tool and then adding in the Bayesian filters, it gets just about everything and is constantly learning more and more, so if a rash of a new kind of spam comes out, it quickly learns about it and starts filtering it out. The last ugly Outlook caused virus didn't even affect me. Spam Assassin caught all of them and I never saw one of them.
So, is e-mail dead? Hell no. Would it be nice to have more ways to identify people, definitely. Would it be nice if spam went away? Of course. But, e-mail is a great way to communicate. It also is a great way to start to talk to people. I have sent e-mail to people I hardly know and started conversations with them.
So, in the end, I think people really need to learn the tools that are available to them and start using them better. I think that will make e-mail much more usable. The other thing? People need to stop clicking on links in spam messages. Everyone seems to hate spam, but some people are still clicking or else they would at some point stop sending them or at least slow down.
