Given the costs, risks and administration time required to manage e-mail, would you eliminate e-mail in your organization if it was feasible to do so? That's the question we asked of e-mail administrators, security managers, IT directors and other messaging- and security-related professionals in a survey that we did for Proofpoint in September.

What we found was interesting: 15% of respondents answered ‘Yes’ and another 11% told us ‘not sure’. That means that one-quarter of messaging-related professionals would possibly or definitely consider getting rid of e-mail if they could.

It’s not surprising that so many decision-makers would like to get rid of e-mail. The SMTP protocol is fraught with security problems, sensitive information can leak easily through careless use of e-mail, content has to be archived for legal and regulatory purposes, e-mail is an entry point for all kinds of nasty malware, and it’s expensive to deploy and maintain. (Compare Messaging Security products)

To be fair, asking if decision-makers want to get rid of e-mail is a bit like asking if they would like to get rid of their 401k. Many people, given the gut-wrenching nature of the past few weeks would love to avoid the heartburn their retirement savings plan has given them. But do they really want to get rid of their 401k? Probably not.

That said, the survey revealed the pain that managing e-mail causes. While it’s not realistic to get rid of e-mail in the foreseeable future, there needs to be a better way of dealing with spam, malware, compliance, data leaks and a host of other solutions that must be implemented.

I’d like to get your thoughts on what you’d like to do with e-mail and where you see its future headed – please send me an e-mail (I still want to keep it around).

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.