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.

''We're really getting back to the roots of office automation," said Irene Grief, director of IBM Research's collaborative user experience lab. The lab, formerly operated by Lotus Development Corp., is now an arm of IBM's legendary Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

White-collar professionals spend much of their work lives swapping reports, transcripts, computer files, databases, and links to Web pages, all via e-mail. These documents are typically stored in their in-boxes and folders, though researchers say some computer users are afraid to shunt e-mail into electronic files because they might forget it.

That means the main desktop computer workspace for many employees is the in-box, and the in-box is an undifferentiated column of e-mail: urgent assignments from the boss; hotel receipts from business trips; correspondence from colleagues on long-term initiatives; notes from spouses requesting a milk pickup on the way home; feedback from supervisors on ongoing projects; reminders about the company picnic; and business propositions from deposed African leaders ( i.e., spam).

''The in-box has gotten too big," Gruen said. ''You come back from lunch and you're almost afraid to check your in-box. It's like getting a brain dump from someone with attention deficit disorder."

IBM's collaborative user experience team has identified three key problems: Employees feel pressure to respond quickly, lose track of e-mail, and suffer from overload from the sheer volume of messages. IBM researchers are seeking to address all three in the Remail project and in future versions of Lotus Notes and other software.

One challenge is easing the anxious sense of interruption employees feel, and the sense they must constantly check their in-boxes or fall behind. Researchers are experimenting with natural language technology that automatically tags, groups, and sorts e-mail by topic, project, and priority, and sends certain categories of messages -- newsletters that need to be scanned, or project files -- to margins and corners of the screen. Users can move messages in and out of side folders, and take ''peripheral actions," such as indicating ''thanks" or ''OK," without disrupting their main view.

To help employees better track their e-mail, researchers are working with text analytics, intelligent tools that crawl through the text of messages and pick out such phrases as ''next Thursday," ''Aug. 19," or ''8/19." These can then be assigned tags or color highlights that will group them and transfer them into calendars.

The feeling of being overwhelmed can be addressed by tools that create contextual e-mail threads so that users have a clear visual map of the groups of people and clusters of projects of which they are a part. ''Once people pick up e-mail that they want to try to answer, they need to see that e-mail in the context of a thread," Grief said. ''That could include documents, websites, and stored instant messaging transcripts."

Such an approach brings IBM researchers into the arena of search, where they bump into competing initiatives underway at such companies as Google Inc., Yahoo Inc., and Microsoft Corp. Microsoft Research, in particular, has been investing in a long-term project dubbed ''Stuff I've Seen," which seeks to aggregate into one view e-mail, computer files, and Web pages culled from a single search.

Grief said IBM uses search as part of a larger mix of technologies.

''Search certainly matters, but you have to know what you're searching for," she said. ''We're developing an understanding of the metadata that's associated with activities. You can tag an e-mail with whether it's part of a beginning, a middle, or an end of an activity."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.