Yes, the message “e-mail is broken” has been bandied about for some time with the rise of spam and other almost-spam messages.

E-mail has fundamentally changed over the last few years. You really can’t argue about that. E-mail used to primarily be for communication between known parties. This is not the case anymore.

While e-mail is still – in my mind – the killer app of the Internet, it is getting less and less useful every day.

For example, I used to use the “leave messages on server for X days” very liberally, just in case I accidently deleted something. Then I could get it back via a different client/Web-based e-mail tool. I used to leave stuff on for 10 days. Now I’m doing either 1 or 2 days. The volume is just to high to do it more than that. It nukes my site space allowance.

I did a (very rough) calculation of e-mail I’ve gotten over the past couple of weeks, and I am getting roughtly 96% spam. It all goes in a spam bucket which is so well trained I haven’t had a false positive for weeks, but still…that’s nutty.

Ninety-six percent.

E-mail is broken.