E-Mail Dominance Faces Challenges

E-mail faces significant challenges from real time communications, spam and bugs and viruses, according to a new report from IDC.

For e-mail to retain its status as the dominant form of electronic communication, e-mail solution providers and their customers must uphold the high value of e-mail while reducing the associated costs and risks, the report said.

“E-mail has faced its challengers — viruses, spam, regulations — and emerged with its reputation bruised, but intact,” Mark Levitt, research vice president for IDC’s Collaborative Computing service, said in a statement.
“Except among teens and young adults and inside certain fast-paced work environments, e-mail is staying ahead of instant messaging in terms of usage.”

IDC predicts that nearly 84 billion e-mails, more than 33 billion of which will be spam messages, will be sent daily worldwide in 2006.

The future status of e-mail, IDC says, will depend on preserving its value throughout its life cycle from creation to permanent deletion while reducing associated costs and risks.

The report also says e-mail can turn back the challenge of instant messaging by providing low- or no-cost access to corporate and consumer e-mail from a variety of devices.

In addition, e-mail must retain a crucial role throughout the collaboration process and raise the visibility of e-mail content so that it parallels that of other enterprise application data and business processes.