Yet more reaction to this article:

Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. "Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email." Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.

From a records management POV, I had these thoughts:

• People are so overwhelmed when they're in the thick of their email, that they can't discern an immediate difference between the ephemeral and the archive-worthy. (This is even though they describe their jobs as mostly managing email.) For this reason also, we can't depend on them to prune their stash of mails.
• If the users can't categorize their mails so they can locate them, then records managers will have even less success at helping anyone find them later.
• If we're faced with having to archive everything, then nothing is of value. You can't find the needle if you keep adding hay to the stack.
• If we establish retention policies, then we're the only ones who will follow them. I perceive these users as being so busy, that they will think of archiving as someone else's job. They already have too much work to do.
• The article doesn't address the issue of file attachments (I use Gmail for file storage as much as for communication) or of the corporation owning your email. File attachments are as important as emails these days.
• Again, it's not mentioned, but users are more likely to hear from corporate IT that their inboxes are taking up too much storage space and that's when they have to purge. At [previous workplaces], we took training now and then on retaining records, but you hear more often that you need to trim down your mailbox size.

Other stray thoughts and babblements:

• This article was written over 10 years ago, and I wonder what biases or expectations the authors and the users brought to the topic of email and email programs. What were they expecting email programs to do for them?
• Having used Lotus Notes at various jobs since about 1995 or so, I can testify that its general yuckiness contributed mightily to the users' problems. Although Notes has added buttons to let you copy a mail into a calendar or to-do entry, those are areas of Notes that users I've worked with know very little about, like the Journal or To Do areas. You can make Notes remind you to do things regarding your mail or tasks arising from it, but it requires you to click buttons and takes you away from the inbox, which seems to be everyone's home base. When people leave the inbox pane, Notes is a lot more forbidding and cold, with toolbars and commands appearing that don't have anything to do with email. (Which makes sense--Notes is a document database program with an apparently sophisticated macro programming language, and these toolbars and commands help with database and record manipulation; an email is just another document in the database to Notes, but that's not how users see an email record. I read somewhere that the original developers built the email app originally just to show what could be done with the language; but it turned out that customers wanted emails more than the databases.)
• That said, Notes STILL doesn't have a threaded message feature as Outlook does and it regularly frustrates me. Add to this annoyance the extra one that [my workplace's] Notes team has turned off full-text indexing, so searches are slow and incomplete, and you can't search within file attachments. I can't say enough bad things about Notes.
• It would be easy to blame the users for not managing their emails, but the problem also lies with the app developers who either don't listen or are unable to accommodate technical improvements that might make life a little easier for their users.
• I think these users were not taught good work habits, basically, and probably expected Notes to do the thinking about their work for them (there I go, blaming the user). I doubt any of them had 90 voicemails just sitting there, yet they'd have twice that many emails just sitting there. What is it about the email UI or the promise of email that makes people think their work is done?

On the subject of Gmail Overload, here are two links to how a PR guy uses Gmail as the center of his information universe. These postings include links to other articles in the series where he contorts Gmail into painful positions.

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/02/transform_gmail.html

Micro Persuasion: How to Use Gmail as a Business Diary and More Tips http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/04/a_few_weeks_bac.html

This link is to a guy who thought email was great and now thinks it's bad. THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_print.html#pollack