A friend of mine who runs his own personal .com domain is currently exasperated by the spamming and virus issues. He's got spammers forging messages "from" his domain, generating huge amounts of back-scatter (bounced messages and the like). Add on the volume of crap generated by e-mail viruses, and he's seriously considering pulling the plug. As in "if you want to contact me, call me on the phone".

Are we truly doomed? Is there a hope? Will we be forced to go back to "closed" e-mail systems like Prodigy originally was, where the only way to contact somebody on the inside will be to be an insider yourself? Will DNSSEC, S/MIME and other crypto technologies come to the rescue? Can you imagine yourself configuring your mailer to reject all unsigned messages?