LOS ANGELES, 23 September 2003 — If computer keyboards evolved as organisms do, the delete key would have long ago grown to dwarf the space bar. Between viruses and spam, we can spend more time getting rid of unrequested e-mail than reading the messages we do want.

Ideally, we’d attack this e-mail pollution by going after the polluters themselves: Get the spammers and the virus authors off the Internet.

But, based on the pronounced lack of success to date, e-mail seems likely to remain its inefficient self. So, what else can we do about it?

Some Internet pundits have suggested that the answer is to move on to other means of communication.

The logical candidate for the job is instant messaging, the real-time, person-to-person text conversations. Any discussion that spans more than three e-mail messages a day can be easier and quicker in IM, which is spam-free in comparison and offers the added advantage of telling you when a correspondent is online and ready to chat. (The latest IM software, given the right bandwidth and hardware, even supports voice and video communication.)

But IM has one giant problem: It’s more property than protocol. Unlike e-mail — an open system you can employ regardless of your software or Internet provider — the most widely used instant-messaging services are run as closed, proprietary systems.

America Online’s IM network, available through its online service and its AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) software, remains the dominant system; ComScore Media Metrix’s data for July show it has almost three times the reach of MSN or Yahoo. But people on those competing services can’t chat directly with anybody on AOL. Getting them to switch to AOL is no answer — do we really want to hand over the future of online communication to one company?

Ways to fix this gap and link these proprietary IM networks exist, but efforts to persuade companies to adopt them (and, in the process, give up a useful marketing tool) have been stuck in the mud for years.

A second e-mail alternative, the new web standard of “RSS” news feeds, can replace a lot of mailing-list traffic but poses its own issues.

RSS — short for “Really Simple Syndication,” first developed as a web-log publishing tool — does nothing for one-on-one communication, but it’s fantastic for handling publications that might otherwise be distributed via e-mail. Instead of mailing out thousands of messages, authors can add special links to their web pages for “news reader” programs; readers then click on them to have their news readers check for and download new content automatically.

News-reader users don’t have to worry about learning different subscribe and unsubscribe procedures, stopping message delivery when they’re on vacation, or the disk space consumed by old mailing-list messages.

But news-reader applications are still in relative infancy. Most are designed for publishers more than readers, throwing in options and capabilities most people don’t care about. (The programs I like so far: NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OS X, at www.ranchero.com, followed by two Windows programs, SharpReader, at www.sharpreader.net, and NewsDesk, at www.wildgrape.net).

Meanwhile, many online publishers are still figuring out what to do with RSS.

So that leaves us stuck with e-mail — not necessarily a bad thing, if we can institute a few other pollution-reduction measures.