Many forecasts about the future of e-mail are worth slightly less than the paper on which they’re printed (or about one ten-thousandth as much as the monitor on which they’re displayed). However, such forecasts at least get us thinking about where e-mail is going and why it might go in the direction we forecast.

For what it’s worth, here’s my take on what the e-mail/messaging landscape will look like in five years.

I believe messaging archiving will become widely deployed in organizations large and small, although we probably won’t think of the technology in the context of “archiving” as we do today. Whereas today’s archiving tends to focus on compliance issues to satisfy rules put forth by government regulators or to satisfy compliance officers, archiving in the future will focus much more on storage management and knowledge management.

Moving storage from e-mail servers to cheaper archival storage gives IT administrators the ability to restore servers more quickly after a crash, and it allows them to restore a more recent copy of the message store, not to mention improve server performance. Users benefit from having access to old e-mail without the worry of managing mailbox quotas. While compliance will still be important, the technical and informational benefits of archiving will be much stronger drivers for adoption of the technology.

Spam will still be with us, but will represent a smaller proportion of e-mail than it does now. A key reason that there is so much spam today is because people still buy stuff that is advertised via spam, giving spammers an economic incentive to continue. While a spam campaign may receive a response rate of only 1 in 30,000 e-mail messages sent, someone sending out a gazillion messages can still make a nice living with such low response.

However, I believe that outbound content scanning will be implemented in such a way that it prevents users from accessing spammers’ Web sites and so reduces the response rate to dramatically low levels. For example, the vast majority of enterprises and most ISPs scan incoming e-mail traffic for spam and quarantine suspected e-mail. However, a user can still pull such messages out of quarantine, click on a link in a message and visit a spammer’s Web site.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.