By Viagra!! With Yahoo and AOL planning a service that will charge businesses to send email , claiming the fee would help reduce fraudulent and spam email, Charles Kraeuter of Forbes has a thought-provoking piece questioning whether it will work. He then paints the scenario that this is another step towards the end of email. Unthinkable? This is what he says:

"Optimists argue that e-mail systems will improve their filtering systems: Research firm Jupiter estimates that spam should decline by 13% per year through 2010. By then, the average person should only encounter 4.5 pieces of junk per day, instead of the nine they receive today.

"But the market may provide a quicker fix, as consumers move from e-mail to systems that have so far proved spam-resistant: instant messages, cell phone text messages and RSS feeds. Any implication that regular users might have to pay postage to send e-mail, especially if it isn' t uniform to other e-mail or communications providers, would immediately create a reason to switch providers."

So what are the implications for compliance with the electronic discovery industry booming, a market that's worth close to $2 billion and said to be expanding at about 35% a year?

Along with law and accounting, it's just another growth area to come out of Sarbanes-Oxley.