In 2001, after extensively studying a group of e-mail users in various high-tech settings, Nicolas Ducheneaut and Victoria Bellotti, two researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, coined a name for this emerging world of e-mail archivers: E-mail as Habitat. In a report under that title, they wrote that e-mail was not just another computer program. For many people, e-mail functioned as a place to "live" -- a central spot from which to manage their affairs.

In many ways, the trouble with today's e-mail programs is that they make poor habitats. Outlook and Eudora and programs like them can be nice to visit, and prioritizers like Mary find them quite useful. But living inside these programs is tough. Essentially, they're fixer-uppers: You need to do a lot of tweaking to each program in order to convince it to accommodate an archiving life, one in which e-mail is not just for communication but also for storing data and, most important, for managing tasks. This is not to say that the programs are broken, or that many people don't find them incredibly useful. There are certainly many Eudora and Outlook partisans in the world who've set up their programs to perfectly manage their digital lives. But that's somewhat beside the point. Shouldn't your e-mail client accommodate your life right out of the box?

The most basic problem with Outlook and Eudora is that they impose on users the idea of organizing messages into many distinct folders. Folders have been around since the earliest days of e-mail (they are, of course, inspired by the paper-based world of physical filing cabinets), and users have grown particularly fond of them over the years. There is something intuitively comforting about putting a message into a folder -- you're giving it a place, and putting something in its place feels clean, organized. Perhaps for this reason, Eudora and Outlook aggressively push folders. When I asked her what Outlook users should do to keep from feeling frustrated with their e-mail systems, a Microsoft spokeswoman said it was simple -- they should file their messages into folders.

Bill Ganon, the vice president for Qualcomm's Eudora Products Group, was even more enthusiastic about folders. "We are believers in the folders and files, in taking a message and putting it where I know it needs to be," he said. Indeed, Ganon likes folders so much that he recommends that Eudora users set up filters that automatically sort incoming mail into separate folders, bypassing the main in box.

This advice, though, is exactly antithetical to the strategy that most active e-mail users employ to tackle the mail. In 1996, Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner, scientists at the software company Lotus, studied how fellow employees at the firm used their e-mail programs. What they found surprised them -- many people kept a great deal of their messages in their main in box rather than filing them into separate folders. For the Lotus employees they observed, the average number of messages stored in the in box was over 2,000, whereas just under a thousand messages were filed into separate folders. Why were the e-mailers keeping so many messages in the in box? The answer will seem obvious to you -- people use their in box for all their current tasks, which they want to keep readily accessible in one place rather than scattered in a dozen areas. They use the in box as a to-do list, or as a place for all the unfinished conversations they're participating in, or for those all too frequent messages of "indeterminate status," which contain information one isn't sure what to do with, or desire some as-yet-unformed reply. Filing messages into folders contributes to an "out-of-sight, out-of-mind problem," says Nicolas Ducheneaut, the e-mail researcher at PARC. "They're not in your in box anymore so you don't see them anymore, so you're actually missing stuff. The filing paradigm is not well suited to keeping track of tasks."

There is another problem with filing messages into folders -- it's time-consuming. Coming up with the correct filing scheme (does it make more sense to file messages by sender, or by project, or by date?) requires a lot of thinking, and sticking to that scheme requires a lot of work. In Whittaker and Sidner's study, it was often the most junior Lotus employees, people who tended to receive the lowest volume of mail, who filed diligently. The managers, people who received the most mail, were the least likely to spend a lot of time filing their messages. The managers expressed no guilt about not filing, either, because they realized what many e-mail beginners do not -- that filing doesn't really make finding messages any easier in the future.

If filing is so useless, why do the main e-mail firms hold it in such high regard? Part of the reason is that, for the longest time, software companies could offer no real alternative to filing as a way to organize mail. In the absence of any kind of filing scheme, the only way to find a specific message in a huge stash of e-mail is to perform a keyword search for it. But searching is computationally demanding, and only recently have PCs begun to offer the power necessary to perform rigorous searches of e-mail.

But search wasn't hampered only by the inabilities of the PC, it was also set back by users themselves. This might be hard to believe, but not too long ago, few computer users felt very comfortable with the idea of "searching" for data. On a PC, searching for something -- an old document, say -- was a chancy affair. There was no guarantee that you'd find what you were looking for, and to have any expectation of success you would probably have to enter in some abstruse bits of Boolean arcana -- AND, OR, etc. Today, of course, people know how to use search -- "it's a new skill that they have," notes Gina Venolia, a user interface researcher at Microsoft Research, which is the company's long-term R&D unit. "People have gotten used to the string-a-bunch-of-keywords-together approach, now that Google is a household name."

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