Searching for Intelligent E-mail Agents

E-mail may have been the Internet's first "killer app," but keeping up with it has become sheer murder. The volume of e-mail defies comprehension: by one count, 32 billion messages a day were sent in 2010, a figure that does not include the roughly 90 percent of e-mails that are spam. A growing number of products and research efforts aim to ensure that e-mail overload doesn't cancel out the productivity-enhancing benefits of IT. Google's Gmail "Priority Inbox" is an early effort in this direction. The feature adds a special icon to messages it judges to be important, allowing users to tend to them first.