E-mail is in its "pimply adolescence," says futurist Paul Saffo at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif. The problems of spam, phishing and e-mail-borne malware will be conquered, he predicts. In the meantime, he cautions, "you can't treat e-mail in isolation. All of our communications forms are melting away, and we are creating new things out of the puddle of old stuff."

Richard Golden, vice president for IT infrastructure at Circuit City Stores Inc. in Richmond, Va., says these threats will cause corporations to augment their technology defenses with strong policy defenses. He says it's relatively easy to protect e-mail systems with spam filters, virus scanners and the like because the systems are well defined, with discrete messages going from Point A to Point B through corporate IT assets.

"But things are converging into a world that is not as clearly definable as a corporate e-mail system," he says. "I think you'll see more policies about things like blogging, for instance. As the lines blur on the means for communications, it's going to require more focus on the information conveyed, regardless of the means used to convey it."

IBM Research is looking for ways to combine e-mail with other functions and integrate it seamlessly into users' daily activities. "It's not enough to help people manage their e-mail; it's important to help them manage their work," says Dan Gruen, a research scientist at the company's facility in Cambridge, Mass. That involves "connecting all the communications and information feeds around a topic or activity," he says.

For example, an IBM Research proto-type called Activity Explorer is a collaboration tool that pulls together e-mail messages, synchronous communication such as instant messages, screen images, files, folders and to-do lists. A project team can establish "activity threads" containing these feeds and can switch easily between asynchronous and real-time collaboration. An activity thread might include the messages, chats and files exchanged among members of a team that's writing a contract bid, for instance.