"You can look at an organizational chart and make all sorts of inferences about how people work, but when you look at e-mail patterns, you see how they work in a different way," he says. "You discover leadership roles, such as who's the hub through which most of the e-mails go, that you wouldn't identify from the organizational chart."

The result of such pattern or network analysis might be to reorganize departments, projects or activities around those hubs, Huberman says.

HP Labs is now prototyping a tool called Knowledge Navigator that's based on those principles. It applies text mining, clustering algorithms and statistical analyses to employee e-mails and presentations stored on HP's servers. It could handle a query such as, "Who are the top five experts on topic x?" Huberman says, even when such expertise is not explicitly noted in org charts or personnel records.

Huberman says this kind of knowledge harvesting will be used by companies internally on their employees and externally on customers, resulting in the ability to generate messages and pitches aimed at both groups. "What we will see in the next few years is a very targeted way of placing information in the hands of relevant people," Huberman says. "Sure, it can be annoying, but it's better than getting spam on things you don't care about."

Despite the benefits, he acknowledges that mining messages raises ethical and potential legal issues. "In the next few years, we will see a blurring of the boundaries between what is considered private and public," Huberman says.