Articles and blogs continue to tout the potential for RSS to replace e-mail. The motivation to find a replacement is obvious: Nobody can spam you with an RSS feed. The spam problem continues to exacerbate, with spam accounting for 92% of the e-mail MXlogic Threat Center processed in August (compared to 84% a month earlier), 70% of the e-mail MessageLabs processed in August, and 87% of the e-mail processed by FrontBridge.

There are other benefits to RSS over e-mail. For instance, if you no longer want to receive a feed, you simply dump your subscription. There is no need to go through the rigamarole of unsubscribing, which doesn’t work half the time anyway.

Consequently, articles and blog entries abound that tout the likelihood that RSS will replace e-mail. While that may be true for lists, however, it cannot replace one-to-one e-mail. Imagine the hassle of maintaining a separate feed for every individual with whom you wanted to communicate and notifying every one of them that they have to subscribe in order to get your messages. Imagine the nightmare if somebody else learned about the feed and began reading your private messages.

Instant Messaging (IM) has also been hailed as a possible e-mail replacement, but its nature doesn’t support longer messages that are easy to send as e-mail, and archiving messages would be a pain. Besides, I’ve had IM spam (also known as SPIM) appear in my IM client.

Fortunately,  e-mail isn’t dead. According to Michael Osterman in his weekly Network World column (delivered by e-mail, of course), 55% of the IT reps his organization surveyed feel that spam is still a problem, but one that spam-blocking technology is dealing with adequately. “Although the spam problem is worse than it has ever been, most organizations that have implemented a technology-based solution don’t feel it too much anymore,” Osterman writes.

The trend, he believes, will continue. In most organizations, the spam problem will simply disappear even though the spammers continue to send the wretched stuff. “Spam blocking will eventually drive most spammers out of business by changing the fundamental economics of spamming—the reduced return from spamming caused by the vast majority of this junk being blocked just won’t be worth the effort for many spammers.”

Osterman’s looking for your opinion at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) His columns are archived at Network World.