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We're all drowning in business e-mail. Even though our e-mail programs are getting better, they're all still based on a 30 year old idea: We have an inbox, an occasional message arrives, we read it, respond and delete it.

Ah, those were the days.

That simple concept, great for the 1990s, was never designed to handle the volume or tasks demanded of today's e-mail software. It's not unusual to return from vacation and have several hundred e-mails queued up. Amidst all the noise, an important message might be buried. Glossing over a key e-mail from a V.P. could make for a very bad day.

What can be done?

Matching The Software to the Task

First, having been using e-mail programs since beginning of Internet Time, I submit that e-mail software today is really more designed for the sender than the receiver. It's all too easy to crank out a message to someone from an address book, but what hoops the receiver has to jump through are opaque to us. That is, until we're on the receiving end of a monster e-mail.

E-mails we receive nowadays have many more interactive elements that the original concept ever anticipated. For example, an e-mail can do one or more of the following things, often in distressing combinations:

• Ask for a response, but the response must wait for more information and coordination with someone else.
• Request that a task be completed at some future date.
• Request or set a meeting.
• Contain some valuable technical or personnel information.
• Be part of an ongoing discussion thread that must be digested.

In response to e-mails that may contain combinations of these elements, we struggle desperately to construct a course of action and a response. Our first blush reaction might be organizational. Popular e-mail programs provide named mailboxes, so we create them and drag each incoming e-mail into one of those mailboxes. When we're done, we're more organized, but probably not better prepared to act.

Some of us, overwhelmed and without the time to even become organized, allow our inbox to become our ToDo list. But when an important message scrolls off the main window, it can be lost in clutter and fall off our radar.

What's worse, the tools we have on our desktop, already barely adequate, don't even exist on our mobile devices. As our e-mail gets more portable, its small container has modest computing power, a small screen, and a miniscule keyboard. We can spend a whole airplane ride cutting, pasting, filing, organizing, and digesting an ocean of e-mail, and we're literally all thumbs.

It's clear that modern e-mail software must address the above issues by smoothly integrating into our calendars, ToDo lists, task managers, and do it in a way that doesn't burden us with a lot of manual labor. We'd like the computer to do all that work.

The State-of-the-Art

E-mail as we know it was born on Unix-based systems that use client-server software and special communication protocols Those protocols, like POP and SMTP, are still used today. However, over time, the POP protocol has failed to evolve. Currently, more effort is put into a slightly newer protocol called IMAP. Even so, IMAP doesn't have all the functionality that we need for sophisticated e-mail management. What's worse, preventing certain kinds of sneaky spammer probes can render the simple nicety of return receipts useless.

To address these IMAP limitations, Microsoft developed new protocols used with their Exchange server and Outlook client. With Outlook, for example, specially formatted messages that request a meeting can automatically create an entry in our calendar. Apple's Mail.app and iCal can also do that. Outlook and its sister program for Macs, Entourage, can also assist with integrating e-mail into projects and personal contacts. But it's all very raw, loosly integrated, and done on a piecemeal basis.

Despite some best-effort integration efforts in both the Unix and Microsoft worlds, we still spend more time than we'd like tying a lot of loose ends together. Basically, our life consists of stuffing information into pigeon holes in the hopes that it'll be useful when we extract it later.

Also, regrettably, industry forces tend to compartmentalize our tools. For example, if a developer creates a great work flow tool, which e-mail program should they support? And e-mail developers are reluctant to work too closely with tool developers who might later become potential competitors. Nor do they typically put massive creative efforts into their own e-mail software because that would sap profits.

Tides of Change

Webmail.us is a company that provides corporate e-mail services to companies that don't want to operate their own e-mail servers. They're working on some new technologies, using RSS readers and advanced search functions, to make life better for their users. Also, working with the the AJAX and DHTML protocols plus Java Script, they believe they can create some very capable Web-based interfaces.

But that's just the interface. What about the fundamental changes?

The open source community may be coming around to what must be done. For example, the highly regarded Thunderbird e-mail project is now paired with a calendaring protocol called Sunbird. But a really hot new open source project to be aware of is Zimbra. Zimbra has tackled many of the problems with today's broken e-mail technologies with imaginative use of SOAP and AJAX protocols. The people behind Zimbra have literally written the book on what ails modern e-mail.

Looking at trends, there seems to be a significant movement to server managed e-mail. Not only does this make legal compliance and management easier for corporations, but it makes mobile access and backups a no-brainer for users. E-mail clients can be simpler, and economies of scale can lead to powerful corporate computers doing the heavy lifting of journaling, searching, scheduling and data mining.

Perhaps the next step will be server side, supercomputer-driven intelligent agents. They might even take human form form, appearing on our desktop and mobile displays, coaching us through our communications and tasks. E-mail as a modern concept may have gotten too complex for any one piece of client software to manage all the demands, but one instance of a major server side system, if elegantly conceived, could be constantly updated and serve tens of thousands of customers.

There's just one catch. E-mail programs don't have the potential to make money like the Apple iTunes store does. Sooner or later, though, a convergence of technologies, inspiration, and the vision of a few people will come together to deliver us from the 30 year old analogue of the classic inbox.

I just hope it's very soon.

This is Warp Core column #89. The Warp Core archives are here:

Year 2000

Year 1999

Your humble author also writes a column for TMO.

John Martellaro is a senior scientist and author. A former U.S. Air Force officer, he has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple Computer. During his five years at Apple, he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager for science and technology, Federal Account Executive, and High Performance Computing Manager. His interests include alpine skiing, SciFi, astronomy, and Perl. John lives in Colorado. He can be contacted via his Website or the Applelinks Contact link.