In my mail this morning, along with the few SoBig messages that made it past my ISP’s mail virus filter and my junk mail filters (see this entry at MacOSXHints for a rule to filter the rest as junk manually), was a notice from Yahoo! Groups that my account had been paused because I had exceeded the maximum number of bounces to my email account. I clicked the provided link to reactivate my account, then looked at the bounce history. Interestingly, only one bounce happened during SoBig; the rest were ancient history. But the email that bounced yesterday was hard bounced by my ISP because the IP address that sent it had been blacklisted. Not by my ISP, by SpamCop.
Now think about the implications of that. Because of an email worm with its own mail engine, not just ISPs and spammers but innocent users could end up on blacklists run by third parties—with no warning. Maybe Dave and others are right about this being the end of email.