Everyone with half a brain can spot the Nigerian e-mail scam, “Dear Sir, excuse me contacting you out of to blue to offer you an insane amount of money in return for your banking details, etc, etc….”

But not so a Brazilian bank, which was taken hook, line and sinker, forfeiting at least $170 million dollars as a down payment on an non-existent construction contract.

The three scammers were jailed on e-mail fraud charges for a total of more than 39 years yesterday. And they had to give back the money. Full story on CNet’s news.com.

According to an article in Business Week, the killer app of the internet, email, has had its day.

Postini, a Californian email filtering business, forecasts that legitimate e-mail will drop to 8% this year, down from 12% last year. According to Business Week, “the onetime productivity wonder has turned into a maddening time waster.”

Because email’s signal-to-noise ratio is now so great, companies like Walt Disney, Kodak, Yahoo! and the U.S. military are dropping email as the prime medium of cooperation in favour of wikis, blogs and instant messaging.

Do incessant phone calls, never-ending e-mails and answer-me-now instant messages consistently wreck your plans for the working day? You are not alone.

A survey of more than 1,000 “knowledge workers” by the consulting firm Basex finds that “interruptions at work waste 28 percent of the day and cost U.S. businesses a staggering $588 billion a year”. On average, respondents reported that they lost 126 minutes a day. That’s a lot of wasted productivity.

The results are not a surprise, of course, but it’s interesting to see some figures.

Entertaining write-up by Mike Langberg too. Spend some of the 126 mins you will waste today reading it.

Or, if you have a lot of time and money, you can buy the full text of the Basex report. It’s only USD 199. (Jeepers!).