>"Email is dying ... War is over ..." I wish I knew what song that was.

Happy Christmas (War is Over)
http://www.lyricscafe.com/l/lennon_john/merryxmas.htm

Steve

This came back from a friend in Brussels after I bounced your piece on email on to him whilst we were talking about new ways of watching TV etc:-)

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/30/0034259&tid=215&tid=95&tid=1

Those figures does not necessarily mean that the number of legitimate emails is decreasing. I would rather guess that the number of spam messages is increasing.

Personally I get about 500 spam messages a day but my spam filter catches 99.8% of that so email is still usable for me.

Martin, you are correct in that we might no be seeing necessarily any drop off in legit email...

This is more a big picture observation. Spam keeps getting bigger and worser, and there is no let up in that trend. At some point, it starts to bite in a systemic fashion, and email starts to suffer because of it.

I predict that point has now passed; I think the phishing epidemic of 2004 has pushed the spam into new territory, and now we are going to see the perpetual over grazing of the commons.

I would caution one thing - if you are protected behind good spam filters, then you can't see it. The question you have to ask is what is happening with the rest of the population and the rest of the systems?

(I for one have just spent the last 3 months with no spam filters other than SpamAssasin from the ISP which just marks the email, doesn't delete it, and is only about 50% effective. So, in practice, ignoring it works just as well. Just last night I got thunderbird 1.0 working again and may now be protected again, we shall see......)

iang