As e-mail has become the preferred medium for communication, the inbox and mail folders become one hub for organizing activities and schedule. The combination of a natural rise in message volume and the large amounts of unsolicited bulk messages (spam) have led some to suggest that the usefulness of e-mail is at an end; users feel overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of individual messages and the effort to manage the inbox. This paper frames the issue of e-mail/message overload as a specific example of data overload and uses previous results to suggest three design concepts – cognitive buoyancy, e-mail constellations, and the intelligent subject line – for use in e-mail.
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