Too much of a good thing

It would certainly be nice if, after remaining practically frozen for so long, e-mail became a hotbed of innovation in the near future. The pace of improvement in the Web browser was fantastic during the 1990s' fight between Netscape and Microsoft, notes Brad DeLong, the University of California at Berkeley economics professor and popular blogger -- and since he receives about 200 messages a day, he hopes we'll see a similar competition between firms over e-mail.

Besides the elimination of file folders and the increased reliance on search, what else can make e-mail easier to use? For several years, Kaitlin Duck Sherwood -- author of the "Overcome Email Overload" series of books and the resident e-mail expert at the Open Source Applications Foundation, a group working on a much anticipated "Personal Information Manager" program called Chandler -- has been calling for one big change in e-mail clients. She wishes that programs would display your mail in the in box according to each message's priority rather than chronologically. When people look at an in box full of new messages, they don't read the messages serially, from newest to oldest. Instead, most people make a rough calculation of each message's priority, and they pick and choose which messages to read first -- for instance, people will look at e-mail from folks they know before looking at something from a stranger. Wouldn't it be nice if your e-mail client listed the messages from people you've corresponded with above all the messages from people you haven't spoken to? Sherwood wonders. Although it is possible, after a lot of work, to make Eudora and Outlook do this, "no client that I know of does this out of the box," she says.

There's no question that such an improvement would make e-mail more manageable. Visionary research projects like IBM's ReMail also promise to make the in box easier to deal with. What's not clear, though, is how much these technical improvements will help. Because for all that engineers tinker with the software, it could be that they'll really fix nothing much if the people who use e-mail still use it cluelessly, both on the receiving side and on the sending. This goes to a mystery over our frustration with e-mail -- when we say that we are overloaded with e-mail, are we complaining about bad software, or about bad people? Take spam, for instance. Is spam fundamentally a social and economic problem, or is it a technological problem? Should we solve spam by tinkering with legal code, or with computer code, or with both?

Clearly, we haven't figured these things out yet -- but the smart money seems to be on the idea that e-mail will be hard to work with unless we develop some way of making the humans who use it more capable with the system. "If you start a new job, nobody ever sits you down and says, 'You're going to be receiving a boatload of e-mail, here are some effective strategies,'" notes Rael Dornfest, the CTO of O'Reilly Media, and a man who receives more than 300 e-mail messages each day.

In the same way, nobody ever tells people what is and what is not acceptable to send via e-mail. "There's not yet well-developed norms about how people should be using it," Lawrence Lessig says. "I get messages from students around the world who'll say, 'I'm doing a paper about copyright -- can you tell me what I should talk about?' That's on the end of totally inappropriate. Then there's the opposite end, when someone says, 'Look at this, it's cool.' Those things are greatest, especially because those people know enough to write two lines. Then there are these people who write these thousand-word-long e-mails, they always start off with, 'My name is ... ' -- as if it didn't say that right on the e-mail. And then they'll explain everything in their lives. You need a clear way to signal to them this is not appropriate."

"The problem I was complaining about was not tech-based," Lessig adds. "I've done a lot to try to improve my interaction with the technology, but my problem is not something that Gmail will solve. It's just substantive -- too many people making demands on my time."

For Lessig -- and for the rest of us, who will someday soon be in the same boat as Lessig -- the only real solution is to shut himself off, to ignore great chunks of e-mail from strangers simply because he has no time to deal with it. Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University who has thought a lot about the future of e-mail, says that we'll all develop approximate filtering mechanismsm in which we'll make determinations like, "The bulk of these thousand messages are so low-yield that there might be one message I might like to read here, but I'm willing to lose that one to make it easier."

"It makes me sad," Shirky says. "There are people like John Perry [Barlow] whose life revolves around the odd happenstance contact that e-mail can provide. It saddens me enormously to think that making e-mail unbroken is going to create a loss of that kind of value."

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