I blogged about it a few weeks ago in a different context. But I’d like to shed more light on the dieing email technology. Yes, yes, yes, It will live on for a long time – but it’s the end of it’s relevance – and therefor eventually die.

My email account receives on average 36,000 emails a month. About 30,000+ are filtered by the server based spam filter. I don’t even notice those 30,000 – other than in a mail server log file saying – deleted 31,074 spam emails.
From the remaining 6,000 email about 5,000 get filtered by my local spam filter. So I end up with about 35 emails per day of which 50% I still care less, 15 – 20 may be informative and 5-10 are real important.
In other words 0.5% of the email volume is important.
Or: 99.5% of emails are a waste of bandwidth, wast of money as I need to buy and maintain spam filters. It’s a sad illusion for customers who trust marketers that they can “deliver the message”.
OK – I get more than 5-10 important messages a day – much more but I get them through different ways. People contact me via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter direct messages, text me, skype me and so forth. Only 20% of what is relevant to me comes through email – and steadily declining. Friends, customers and peers know – if something is REALLY important they skype me.

Now – you may say but if 5-10 are very important you can’t throw it over board. Right ! But it tells me that there will (hopefully soon) somebody come up with a cool new idea to get those 10 important messages to me without all the overhead of spam and filters.

I look forward to the day I can announce that I no longer use email – which I predict will happen within the next 18 month.

Axel
http://xeesm.com/AxelS