I'm this >< close to giving up on email. The tons of spam on mailing lists is almost manageable, even with some Korean (and possibly some Chinese) spam, but now that Ralsky (spamford spawn) guy won't stop forging my hosts domain name. On top of that, clueless newbies engage in unsubscribe storms on every other mailing lists every week (and never reply to any help offer); quoting standards (and netiquette) fractured due to Microsoft MUAs; same company offers worldwide virus distribution services for anyone wanting it. The only (real) solution is throwaway addresses, which means giving up fighting spammers, and using their tricks.
TMDA? Yes, I was using a similar method almost five years ago, see <slrn5lrvt9.4dp$1@shadow.banki.hu>, but spammers still try to spam my addresses used in 1997...
OTOH, no other communication form is safe from these problems.. IRC, (any IM too, as I hear, I'm left out), web boards, SMS.
The Internet needs an overhaul as it stands, increasing capacity is no longer working (ignoring the fact that companies don't want to give it us either..) I've read a summary the other day about some traffic research in cities. The gist of it was if you increase the capacity of the roads, more people use them, and after a short period, it will be as crowded as now. Interestingly, it works both ways, if you reduce the capacity (road blocks, digging, parking restrictions), cars seem to disappear from the limited areas. The same seems to happen on internet. If you give a bunch of 2 hours@56k modem users 24h@10 mbits a day connection, they will use it up the same way doing nothing really more (but mirroring 600M iso images just to have them at hand). It must be our instinct... We must work it around, as much technically, as mentally. Is this the same as the tragedy of the commons?