Wired on Friday:Is e-mail doomed? That's a question I often get asked - not usually in e-mail, but then, how would I know? So much of my e-mail gets eaten by blacklists or misbehaving spam filters, or is drowned in messages from mailing lists I subscribed to but can't leave or from businesses from whom I bought one T-shirt a decade ago and are still pleading for my return, writes  Danny O'Brien

No, the question is usually asked, in person, by colleagues my own age, after they've spent any time with somebody under 21. It's shocking, they report back from that far-off frontier. They don't use e-mail! They use instant messengers or text- messaging, but they don't have an e-mail address.

E-mail is dying among the young, like Latin or jokes about 1970s children's television. The @ symbol is at risk.

It's not quite true that the young don't use e-mail. Most of my younger friends don't lack an e-mail address. In fact, quite the opposite - they have lots of them. They'll create one to receive the confirmation message from whatever online service they've just joined, and then abandon it.

The same is true for their brief appearances in social networking sites like Bebo and MySpace: they'll create and abandon such sites many times, toying with them as long as it remains interesting, and then moving on. Social media researcher Danah Boyd has noted that teenagers often will skip from one identity to another as quickly as they forget their passwords. Instant messenger accounts and phone numbers are a little longer lasting, but not by much.

With a temporary, throwaway approach to Net identifiers, much of the other worries about e-mail's imminent demise become less terrifying. The bugbear of hardened mail users, spam, no longer poses much of a threat, since you discard an e-mail account long before spammers have discovered it. And the continuing problem of being able to move an e-mail account with you (the Net equivalent of mobile phone portability) disappears too - if you don't expect to take it with you, why should you care?

That still leaves quite a few issues for both the Net and for its users.

Firstly, even if users move on, somebody has to maintain those moribund e-mail accounts. Most of us grab our discardable e-mail addresses from centralised sites like Hotmail or Dodgeit.com. Those sites have to cope with the continuing floods of spam, whether we read them or not. Even large companies like AOL now have a policy of deleting mail after a few weeks of it not being read, and the internet's many engineers complain about the weight of unsolicited spam filling up its bandwidth and wasting time.

And then, there's the damage to users of not being able to put a stick in the sand and declare a universal, permanent identifier. E-mail is not the same as instant messaging (IM) for many reasons - but one is clear: you don't expect to hand out your IM handle to all and sundry. E-mail is the device by which if somebody doesn't know you, they can still contact you. I give my e-mail address (danny@spesh.com) to far more people than I would give my mobile phone number. Given that the net is supposed to improve our connectivity to others, the idea that someone can be online, but impossible to quickly contact, is a loss.

Perhaps it's simply impossible to have a system where strangers can easily discover you and that isn't susceptible to the ravages of spam. Perhaps we all need to hide a little from the world. But that won't stop us inadvertently blurting out our contact names in a way that eventually leaks to the wider world. Right now, we keep our IM handles secret - but how many are we leaking it to? And does that mean that one day, we'll have to abandon those too?

It may be that this is one of those times when the instincts of geeks and the wider public diverge. Technologists are always trying to work out ways to make identifiers simpler and more permanent.

For instance, a recent initiative has been to create "i-Names", which are like web addresses for human beings. I can register the i-Name "=dannyobrien", and have it permanently attached to whatever e-mail addresses, phone numbers or locators that I currently occupy.

It's all tremendously clever, and has many in the net community excited.

But perhaps we don't want a permanent virtual pin stabbed through us, like a butterfly. Perhaps we all rather like to be semi-anonymous and free to change our masks online. That is an attraction of the net that's been around as long as e-mail.

"Technology is a bit too obsessed with remembering; there's a lot of value in forgetting," says Boyd.

At the very beginning of the web, when the first spam was appearing, and my first friend was declaring the end of e-mail in portentous tones, another took a very simple strategy. He appended the month and the year to the first part of his e-mail address, and declared that he would switch to a new one at the first of every month. Perhaps that - or its equivalent - will be what we all end up pursuing: endlessly escaping strangers and spammers, at the cost of building a permanent homestead on the net.