Yesterday, I wrote that email is dead. And, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, email is still dead.

One reason email is dead is phishing – scams that entice people to give up their passwords so they can be robbed, by appearing as emails from legitimate merchants. There is an article in today’s Washington Post about this and the general issue of a major rise in cyber crime in 2006. We should expect that as online community becomes more important and robust, criminals will become more aggressive and engaged as well.