Handling e-mail overload

The typical user receives about 45 e-mails every day, although some receive upwards of 150 to 200 e-mails daily. The typical user, therefore, spends a significant amount of time each day simply filtering and processing e-mail, much of which is not relevant to his or her job. The problem is compounded for mobile users who are often faced with downloading e-mail over slow dial-up lines and then having to pick through the relevant content.

One company attempting to resolve at least some of the problem is AmikaNow!, a small Ontario company that was born out of artificial intelligence work performed by the National Research Council of Canada. Essentially, AmikaNow!'s products analyze the content of e-mail and then abbreviate that content using AI technology. Instead of simply reducing the length of words or eliminating punctuation, AmikaNow!'s technology picks out key elements of the content of each e-mail and presents this abbreviated content to the user while maintaining the integrity of the original message. The company's MessageBack feature permits mobile users to process selectively the full text of an e-mail, if necessary. The goal of AmikaNow!'s technology is simply to allow the user to scan and glean the relevant content of e-mails more quickly while maintaining full e-mail capabilities.

AmikaNow!'s products are offered in a variety of configurations. The Enterprise Edition Server provides the abbreviation capability for desktop and wireless users, a wireless e-mail notification engine, and MessageBack. The enterprise server can be used in Notes/Domino and Exchange environments and supports e-mail policies in both. AmikaFreedom.com is aimed at service providers who want to provide AmikaNow!'s e-mail abbreviation capabilities for their wireless customers. AmikaFreedom for Outlook is aimed at individuals and small organizations and provides the abbreviation capability, as well as rules-based forwarding. In addition to these products, AmikaNow! offers software components that can provide the abbreviation capability for a variety of OEM platforms, including servers, wireless devices and wireless gateways.

While AmikaNow!'s products still require human intervention in processing e-mails, they nevertheless provide an interesting - and perhaps very useful - first step to solving e-mail overload problems.

Michael D. Osterman is the principal of Osterman Research, a market research firm that helps organizations understand the markets for messaging, directory and related products and services. He can be reached by clicking here.

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