Voice, video, virtual this, virtual that—all may eventually have their day, but for now, email is still the killer of all killer apps on the Net. We know this just from considering how much of our waking life we spend reading, writing, organizing, and trashing our own voluminous e-mail. If we’re not indicating precisely what we mean to say or dragging messages to one of the 50 or so folders we’ve set up, we’re likely to be puzzling out the logic of a new mail filter, weeding our contact list, or fiddling with a new message signature.

Like it or not, e-mail has become a pivotal technology for modern, everyday life and one that for many people is at least as important, if not more, than the telephone itself. Our friends at IDC reckon that the number of electronic mailboxes worldwide is currently growing at around 140% a year. E-mail’s a given on desktops and it’s fast becoming standard feature on cellphones and personal digital assistants, too. In many ways, however, the tremendous growth in e-mail usage is overwhelming the ability of both individuals and corporations to cope. And as the medium becomes more vital and critical, the pain is growing acute. Simply put, e-mail technology is falling increasingly short of what’s required of it. For several years now, innovation in mail clients has stagnated relative to other categories of desktop software, and advances in the functionality of Web-based mail services, on which hundreds of millions of consumers worldwide depend, has ground to a virtual halt. Enterprises, meanwhile, are faced with the mounting costs and challenges of administering sometimes hundreds of distributed mail servers, blocking floods of incoming spam and viruses, making sure employees don’t mail company secrets to the wrong people or say the wrong thing in outgoing messages, and archiving mountains of mail to meet increasingly strict regulations. The storage aspects of e-mail, alone, are staggering: A 1,000-person company may easily generate and accumulate 1 terabyte of mail and attachments, and our friends in the storage business are looking at e-mail as likely the first petabyte application.

Cluttered desktop

That said, Outlook, with help from its sister Outlook Express, has pretty much swept the enterprise market. Microsoft has been clever, we think, in opening up the product to outside developers, making several APIs and an object model available so that virtually any piece of data within Outlook is now accessible. Still, we see several attempts underway to create alternatives to Outlook. Stata Labs, for instance, has created a mail client called Bloomba that excels in managing large mail databases. Many users keep several hundred gigabytes of mail on their desktops, using the messages as a chronological record of important activities, an informal contact list, and an aid to finding important files that arrived as attachments. Outlook, Stata asserts, starts to bog down when this kind of database size is reached.

Bloomba attacks the problem with a fast database searching facility that indexes not only all message text but all attached files, too. The search function is fast enough to scan a multi-gigabyte database in 1 second or less, the company says, versus the 15 to 20 minutes that Outlook typically requires. With this level of speed at their fingertips, users start to alter their behavior qualitatively, the company tells us: Instead of sorting mail into a hierarchy of folders for easier recall, for instance, users just search on keywords whenever they need to find an old message or group of messages. Stata is aware that Outlook 2003 will sport enhanced searching, but it believes its product will outperform Microsoft’s hands down. The company is offering Bloomba in beta version at no charge for now and building word of mouth. It’s also gaining attention for Bloomba by selling a wellreceived spam-killer add-on, called SAProxy. Stata plans to release a commercial Bloomba product, priced at $40 or $50 per copy, in late September. Target customer: Individuals and small professional firms that rely heavily on mail.

Open Field Software has taken a slightly different approach to the problem of organizing large mail databases. Its Ella software, based on an “adaptive learning engine” licensed from Saffron Technology in Morrisville, NC, can automatically sort messages based on their content and header data. The first release of Ella is aimed at filtering out spam: Show Ella 10 or 15 examples of spam and by looking at around 100 attributes, it will “learn” enough to sort out similar messages in the future. It doesn’t stop learning, either, but continues to refine its model of spam and improve its hit rate over time. (Apple Computer has built a similar spam filtering facility into its Mac OS X operating system.) Ella can classify “good” mail and other unstructured texts, too, helping users to follow connections between different sources. Founded in 2001 with internal financing, Open Field plans to seek venture backing by year-end.

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