Anybody who has lived in the security industry for a while has read articles like this one. I have to say that I'm somewhat fatiuged by it.

Before I rant a bit, I'll issue a caveat: I'm the first to argue that the majority of people don't take security seriously enough. It's the first thing to go on most budgets, and if it weren't for regulatory compliance issues, it'd be the easiest thing in the world to dismiss with the "it won't happen to me" excuse.

But it's time to have the conversation as though people are intelligent.

The thing that bothered me the most was this line:

"Trust is nearly gone for email", Perry declared. I suspect it is gone completely.

The author then goes on to show that only 1-3% of email is legitimate, and suggests (by implication) that email faces a slow death.

I hate to say it this way, but that is ridiculous. Email isn't going away because of spam and viruses any more than snail mail went away because of junk ads and mail-bombs.

The key is to solve the business problem around it, not to make it go away. Email is here to stay. And no amount of FUD like "EMAIL IS DEAD!!! SPAM KILLED THE EMAIL STAR!" will change that fact.

I understand that it makes good business sense for the speaker (VP at Trend Micro) to spread this - his business is around sanitizing email from threats. But the real question around spam and viruses is about business - specifically, how much time and money are you spending to combat the problem?

It's really a time/space problem (as TK likes to say): how much time/resource are you wasting because of the threat. If you can then counteract it at a cost less than that, it's sensible.

Example: I get a pile of spam (100-200/day). However, my mail filters are good enough that I only see about 10/day. The cost is so insignificant that I simply delete those 10 (or add them to my mail filters) manually. I don't go out and search for a product to handle them, because it's such a small resource requirement.

I certainly don't stop using email because of it. Nor will I ever.