The GMail spam filter, bar-none, has been the most effective I've ever used. I'm down to probably 10 emails a month making it through to my actual inbox. My sloppy math indicates this is around .01% "failure" rate for the GMail algorithm...insanely effective. This month (December '06) has already seen a major increase in the amount of spam my email account is recieving.

It does, however, highlight an interesting underlying reality: almost 98% of my recieved email is spam. Ninety-eight percent.

...which is the founding premise for an upcoming post: Email Must Die.

I'll expound later, but here's my nutshell: Email, as we know it today, was founded (conceptually) on an adaptation of a physical distribution infrastructure, including methodologies based on physical-world problems. That conceptual framework (the distribution of tangible items between parties) was developed to be efficient within the constraints of the physical world. When those frameworks (and inherent assumptions) are translated to an electronic world and scaled exponentially, the ability for the system to function rationally decreases inversely.

The cultural technorati figured this out a decade ago, when bulletin board (or Usenet) "discussion threads" were at their zenith, and later shifted to blogging as a means of solving one of many problems of authority and attribution. The model of blogging scales better....

....because at the end of the day, we're really talking about the written word. Email, blogging....it's really the same thing.....communication via written language. The problem is we've applied different interpretive frameworks to what is essentially a singular means of communication (think of the cultural pervasiveness of xyz@---.com mindset).

My overall idea is that email (and all the assumptions/behaviors that come with it) will shortly disappear and will be replaced by another system of party-to-party interaction (think Instant Messeger Chat, Skype). In a couple of years, the idea of an "address" or "inbox" or any other adopted terminology will be SO early-century.

Comments currently open, and encouraged.