Spam undermining viability of email - IDC

The future of email as the dominant form of electronic communication and collaboration is becoming less certain due to rising spam and instant messaging usage, according to a new study from IDC. With more than 500 million business email users worldwide this year and more than 20 billion spam messages expected to be sent daily worldwide by 2006, the impact on business communications is huge.

IDC estimates that spam represents 32 percent of all external and internal email sent on an average day in North America in 2003, up from 24 percent in 2002. The rising torrents of spam are reducing the usefulness of email by forcing users and IT staff to expend additional time and energy to identify, delete, and prevent spam from clogging inboxes.

Consequently, the value of the immediacy and presence awareness that instant messaging delivers is being noticed more widely in the workplace. However, instant messaging is becoming more similar to email in terms of corporate requirements for tracking and archiving of messages.

"To keep email at the collaboration centre stage, email proponents will need to do a better job of helping end-users manage email and use other collaborative tools in conjunction with email," said Mark Levitt, research vice president for Collaborative Computing at IDC.

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