Email and the Titanic

Of course, there have been many problems with email, for many years now (it consists mainly of spam and viruses), despite all the bright people trying to fix them. And it is unlikely to improve.

Kelly Martin (of SecurityFocus), believes it is a sinking ship and we we should just ditch it:

All the work spent fixing email is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Email is a sinking ship and it should be abandoned just as other insecure technologies like telnet, ftp and the beloved Usenet nntp were "abandoned" years ago."

As someone who has used email since the late 80' and even wrote an email module for Perl, I wonder what might eventually replace it.