Just in case you ever sue me, you should know that I have every e-mail I have ever sent or received since 1992. That’s crazy from a legal standpoint, I know, but I can’t help myself. I’m obsessive-compulsive that way. But having a clear view of 16+ years of mail amounting to more than four gigabytes of mainly ascii text gives me a sobering sense of how poorly e-mail does the job lately compared to its glory days of, say, 1999.

More than ninety percent of my mail today by volume is spam. Back in 1999 spam was about 15 percent of my mail. Of course I am in large part to […]