The Future of E-mail

(8-16-04). Researchers seek to untangle the e-mail thread. E-mail is a victim of its own success. That's the conclusion of IBM Corp. researchers in Cambridge, who have spent nearly a decade conducting field tests at IBM and other companies about how employees work and use electronic mail. It's clear to them that e-mail has become the Internet's killer application. . . . "Initially there was a sense that e-mail was just a way of communicating with people," said IBM research scientist Dan Gruen, who is leading the company's Remail (reinventing e-mail) project. ''Then came attachments, and e-mail became a way to transfer things. Now people almost live in their in-boxes. You know they're checking it on a regular basis, so that's where people will go to reach someone." The centrality of the in-box wasn't envisioned by the first generation of e-mail developers. For the new generation it's a given. So the in-box of the future will feature new user interfaces with contextual threads, peripheral views, text analytics, and automatic sorting. A Remail prototype with some of these features was demonstrated at an IBM research forum last week."