Is This the Future of Email?

Your company scans incoming email for viruses and outgoing messages for confidential information. Your spam filter snags most of the garbage, and it gets better as it learns the latest spamming and phishing spoofs.

You're encrypting sensitive email now, and you recently completed a project that keeps your messages safely archived in case federal regulators come knocking.

Indeed, with the right technology, the right policies and a little slice of your budget, you can pretty much manage the messaging madness.

And new technology likely to emerge from the labs in the next year or two will help bring a little more civilization to the world of e-mail, ensuring its continued place among the most popular and important of all corporate applications.

However, email's problems will accompany it into its second act, especially as users deploy a growing variety of mobile devices and discover new ways of communicating -- such as instant messaging, blogs, wikis and virtual reality spaces you've never even dreamed of.

These will offer green pastures for hackers, spammers and phishers, and will require a whole new round of defensive tools, techniques and policies.

While today's efforts to improve email are aimed mostly at curing its ills, research in vendor and university labs points to brave new uses for the humble email message, from knowledge mining to workflow enhancement.

Interviews with researchers, futurists and IT managers yielded the following conclusions about the future of email.

Continue reading this article from ComputerWorld.

Technorati Tags: email. email marketing, internet, profits, blog, marketing, money, business