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Introduction E-mail is ubiquitous. With 9.6 billion business e-mail messages sent worldwide in 2001, it is impossible to deny that e-mail is one of the most successful tools ever invented. Ironically, it is e-mail’s very popularity that creates a new challenge. As both the style of usage and sheer volume grows, the ability of end users to identify and respond to valued business issues is severely hampered. In fact, according to Gartner Group: · One third of internal business e-mail is unnecessary · Employees spend an average of 49 minutes a day managing e-mail · Almost a quarter of employees spend more than an hour a day managing e-mail · Only 27 percent of e-mail that employees get demands immediate attention. Take, for instance, this snapshot of an Amacis employee’s inbox. Recognizing that he is drowning in unproductive e-mail, he has turned on the junk mail filter feature within Microsoft Outlook. This feature has allowed him to weed out 37 of his 128 new messages. However, he is left with the significant problem of sifting through 81 messages in order to identify and respond to the important ones. Of the remaining messages, a mere 12% were business related and only 3% required attention. In or