E-mail will survive.

I could easily join the gloom and doomers and proclaim the death of e-mail (which I think I did write about in my June issue.)

The more I think about it e-mail is an entity much like New York. The place gets overcrowded, goes through crises that threaten its long term viability and eventually survives, even resurging, at times, with greater brilliance than it had before. It's a city we can't afford to let go down tubes. Its denizens won't give up on its cosmopolitan lifestyle that makes their lives vibrant and culturally advanced. (Okay, I'm a New Yorker and on the biased side!).

But think about it. The e-mail channel is certainly cluttered, e-mail boxes are overstuffed, and over-spammed. Yet people don't want to give up on it. Email is just too great. It's a way of life, with all the characteristics of a civilization. It streamlines project management, making it easy to communicate with groups of people in an instant, it lets you keep tabs on your son in college or in a foreign country. People even fall in love via e-mail,.

Software providers, users and ISPs are beginning to engage themselves more heavily in the war against spam while our government drags its heels. Powerful technologies are coming into the foreground that enable both senders and receivers to gain control over spam. Yahoo, MSN and AOL all have given filtering capabilities to their users. Even lesser ISP's have followed suit. In addition, most have set up "bulk" e-mail boxes where they deposit e-mails the ISP's detect as being sent in large waves of mail.

It's time to join this war. Use filtering software or options your ISP provides, report spam, and don't purchase items offered by a spammer. The less effective spammers become the more likely they will wither away with time.

E-mail is not like banner ads and pop-ups that have both fallen from grace, each in a few years' time. Nobody needs a banner ad or pop-up to run his life or business. Advertisers might bemoan their loss of effectiveness and revenue earned from them. But we all need e-mail to be a viable channel. We just have to get through a bad run of polluting factors. And we'll outsurvive them because spammers are riding the opportunistic tide. Eventually they'll be beached.