WIRED:IT'S THE longest deathbed scene I've ever had to watch. E-mail, according to the pundits, has been on its last legs for over five years now – tottering around for nearly half the time I've had an e-mail address.

So why won’t it finally keel over? It’s almost 40 years old, a clunky old duffer of a protocol from the jurassic age of the net, poisoned with malware and bloated with spam. And yet in 2008 we sent each other about 60 billion e-mails daily (another 150 billion are probably spam or malware).

Its importance for our personal and private lives was highlighted by Barack Obama’s determination to hold onto his Blackberry, despite all the warnings and rulings by his own security and archiving staff.

I'm sending this column via e-mail to several different Irish Timesaddresses, to prevent spam filters snatching it away. So why won't it go?

Five years ago, the line was that the young people were leaving e-mail in their droves. First it was to text each other, then the world was communicating via MySpace. Then Facebook. Now it’s Twitter. And why not? They’re brighter, with smart and clever features and with precious little spam. How could old e-mail compete?

Well, e-mail may, in the background, remain as simple as it’s always been. But now it’s surrounded by an ecosystem of smart, clever features itself. Google’s Gmail, for instance, has re-integrated many users’ e-mail with calendaring and chat. Microsoft, Apple and others have upgraded their e-mail clients to deal with a more complex world.

And while there’s more spam than ever before, it’s mostly disappearing behind the filters constructed by anti-spam groups and smarter software. If you’re still getting drowned in spam, you might want to consider changing your e-mail provider, your e-mail software – or both.

Spammers seem to becoming, if not a vanishing breed, at least a smaller bunch of professionals, rather than the endless army of chancers they used to be. It’s become apparent that the bulk of spamming has been taken over by a hardcore of criminals.

When a single American provider of services to spammers was taken offline in November, total spam levels dropped by 70-80 per cent. The threat with unsoliticited mass e-mails was always that the effect was far out of proportion to the effort put in: anyone in the world could send a million mails for pennies, and eke out a living. But now, it appears, only the most hardbitten are even trying – implying that for most scammers, spam isn’t worth the effort. Whether that’s because they’ve been pushed out by the professionals or that spam-scanning means that most spamming e-mail just isn’t seen by its targets, it’s difficult to say.

We could try to tackle those groups’ weapons of mass e-mail and quench the torrents of spam that way. Those weapons are not held by criminals or marketeers. They’re in our living rooms and in our offices. Most spammers these days send their mail by taking over unsecured computers owned by unsuspecting consumers and businesses. Would fixing those zombie computers save e-mail from spam? I doubt it because the great features that make e-mail irreplaceable are the same things that make spam inevitable.

If you allow anyone to send you a message for free, and that message doesn’t go through some central chokepoint, and you don’t mind strangers knowing how to contact you, you’ll get spam. Those are the reasons for spam, and they’re also the biggest-selling points of e-mail.

You can charge other people to send you a message (as texting does), but you won’t get as many useful free services as e-mail provides. You can leave the spam fighting to some central service, such as MSN Messenger or Aim, but you’ll need everyone in the world to join the same corporate website before it will give you the breadth of e-mail’s reach. Good luck with that. You can shelter yourself from spam by using a service that’s closed to strangers, such as Facebook (or just hiding your e-mail address).

E-mail got its brand new Gmail, Outlook and Mail App features because anyone can write and tweak an e-mail client.

It gets its audience because anyone can set up a mail server. And it gets its longevity because it can outlive any one company. It gets its clumsiness, its warts and its spam from the same roots. It’ll always be a great tottering mess of an internet service. And long may it live.