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Email is dead, according to some high profile figures.

Meanwhile, email use continues to grow steadily, and by some estimates nearly 80% of all business data can be found in email. Yet, even many of email's greatest fans believe that after nearly 40 years of evolution, email has pretty much settled into its final form. I think they're wrong - we have only seen the beginning of what email can do.

Much of email's ongoing evolution is happening behind the scenes. The stability of the email user experience hides a surprising amount of ongoing innovation. In any evolving, complex system, the parts that work best are the least likely to evolve, and will tend to appear static. Today's email user experience looks a lot like the experience of a quarter century ago, even before the emergence of such major innovations as POP, IMAP, and Webmail. So what's driving email evolution in 2012? Ironically, it is both spam and cloud computing. Let's see why.

You may not know the name J.D. Falk off the top of your head, but he worked tirelessly to protect your inbox from spam. Falk's untimely death came yesterday at the age of 37, but he fought cancer long enough to see his IETF RFC published.

Jesse David Falk was a founding member of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE), the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (MAAWG), and was an active member of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

Anyone who runs an online site knows that comment spam is a continuing battle. And as the accompanying infographic shows, prepared by social spam fighter Impermium, it is a big problem. They took samples of the social Web this summer, looking at more than 100 million different pieces of user-generated content around the world from various Web sites and comment streams. They found that on some sites as many as 40% of the registered accounts were spammers. One site saw more than 30,000 fraudulent new accounts created in an hour, with a combined posting of 475,000 garbage messages. The boot maker Uggs was the most exploited brand by a factor of two over others, and fashion even beat out porn in spam postings. That is saying something.

According to a post on the Spamassassin Tips blog, there's some evidence that spam is tapering off from earlier in the year. Is spam really down, or is it too soon to get excited?

When you have enough companies trying to ride the viral invite/closed beta wave with closed betas for a business to specialize in viral invites, it's time to pull the plug. Artificial (or real) scarcity imposed by marketing as a promotional gimmick is no reason to spam your friends, folks.

This morning I reached my personal tipping point for the viral invite gimmick. I was already well poised to boil over after the U.S. launch of Spotify, but this morning another service (that I won't encourage by providing a link or name) put me over the edge. Not only is it another bogus "invite only" closed beta, but the company promises faster access if you offer up email addresses for at least three friends.

As of this morning Google Apps customers have the option of signing all outgoing email with the email authentication standard DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). Users who enable this service will be much less likely to have their email blocked by a recipient's spam filters. Google Apps administrators can find the new option in the "Advanced Tools" tab of the control panel.