Everyone struggles with the issue of spam. Fortunately spam filters have improved greatly, helping to limit the volume in individual email inboxes. In my own case, spam messages are blocked at two levels, one where the server keeps it from even accessing my email program and the other where Outlook sends it to junk mail for me to review later. Still, new messages get through every day.

I read an interview yesterday with Eric Allman, who helped develop SMTP while he was a student at Berkeley. Queried about when we would eliminate spam, he said we would never get rid of it, but the good news was that, “like cockroaches, we can get spam to the point where we can coexist with it and keep it down to an acceptable number.”

When asked what we could do to deal with email overload, he recalled former times when a secretary would read all of an executive’s mail first so that the executive only handled the important things. He predicts that there could be a tool developed that would be capable of learning what you think is important and just present that to you. This might be a couple of years from now before that could become a possibility.

In the world of technology two years is several generations down the road, but in our personal, fast-paced world, it is not far off. So few people have administrative assistants now compared to past times. An electronic one is an interesting concept.

If you had one wish for help in handling your email, what would that be?