The contents of my inbox have been the same for some time. I don't have a problem with spam, as I've ceased to receive any spam since I put my two mail accounts through Google Mail, the issue is all I receive in my inbox is status updates of various kinds from social networks. E-mail is effectively dead for me. The only time I use e-mail is at work (and then radically less than most people) and when I need to interface with something 'work related' from a personal perspective. This in itself is significant: the corporate setting uses e-mail, but the personal setting increasingly doesn't and has, or is rapidly in the process of, consigning it to the scrap heap.

Personally, I've never been a big user of e-mail in my personal life. This is because something more focused has always been available, such as a discussion forum or IM. I've always been a big fan of IM from the very early days, and I can track the way crowds of people moved from one IM to the other. Now it's Facebook IM by a significantly large margin and it was obviously a very sensible idea for them to integrate IM into their site. I have less than a handful of contacts on Google Talk and MSN, everyone else is Facebook IM. I just can't remember using e-mail in a big way. I remember the odd role-playing game discussion over e-mail in the early days, but most of it has been IM, forums and private messages on forums.

The only time I use e-mail now is for interfacing with the job market, but this is driven by the fact e-mail is still a core application for business. I wonder how long this can continue, to be honest?

Now, I'm not a big fan of e-mail in the work place. I'm not some sort of weird Luddite, obviously, I just think e-mail gets misused a lot and often becomes problem rather than a solution. E-mail has it's place, and it's uses, I think my issue is there is often a better way to do something and e-mail just gets used by default.

First, e-mail is really bad for focused, sensible and productive discussion across a group of people. If you have a dispersed workforce IT is brilliant for bringing intelligent minds together to solve problems. E-mail just isn't the tool. The thread of conversation gets disjointed, all messages don't go to all people, etc. This is why I believe discussion forums, team rooms, web 2.0 tools (or Lotus Domino tools back in the mid-nineties) are all better. They focus the conversation in one place resulting in a richer and traceable thread of ideas and concepts. Link it all up with a contextual presence awareness and you have a much better way of doing things than e-mail, and it can be extensible by adding more tools into this virtual location. As is usually the case, all this has been possible for a while before the Web 2.0 stuff, as IT tends to recycle, improve and renew ideas. If you're running a project with a range of stakeholders I'd rather use a properly configured team room than shoot e-mails off in every direction. I'd restrict e-mail to notifications of new content in the team room.

Second, it seems all too easy for some organisations to fall into management by e-mail, and this rapidly engenders a range of systemic problems around bad communication, inefficient organisation and a strange psychology shift to 'I sent him an e-mail' somehow equating to a job having been done. It's very dysfunctional, impersonal and can reach almost surreal levels of ridiculousness. It gets so bad, medium sized change projects amount to an e-mail being sent to a significant proportion of individuals and an assumption that that's the end of it. What then happens next is so many e-mails are sent the lag from reception to reading an e-mail can be days or nearly weeks. It's my view something is seriously going wrong with someone's work patterns or the organisation itself if individuals don't even get around to reading e-mails for a handful of days. This process tends to foster the impersonality of the organisation, to the extent of fostering resentment, rather than utilising IT to bring teams together, it's almost the opposite of what's supposed to be going on.

The back of e-mail will eventually be broken in the business environment, and it'll be replaced with something more interactive, but not necessarily so, and something more personal and focused. I suppose Google Wave is one possible shot in this direction. The web is becoming less anonymous and more identity-based with surprising speed. It may well take a while. It may well take a generational change. As far as I'm concerned? I ain't going to lament the loss as I've been personally trying to break the back of e-mail for sometime.

The death of e-mail? Bring it on. Of course this means I'm a Gen-Y person in a Gen-X body, so the studies tell me, but then I've 'suffered' this for a while.