"My feeling is that if you have more than a screenful of e-mails in your in-box, you're being rude," said Clarke, a technical sales and marketing manager at Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd. in Richmond, British Columbia.

Clarke is an archetypal "filer," spending hours a day managing his Microsoft Corp. Outlook e-mail program.

The latest version of Microsoft's Outlook personal information manager adds several key improvements to its e-mail function that beta testers and analysts say are helping early users better cope with ever-growing inboxes.

The new version, Outlook 2007, has been available to business users since November and will ship to consumers later this month.

Clarke, whose company began beta testing the new version early last year, credited the improved search capabilities, along with junk mail filtering and other features with cutting the time he spends managing e-mail each day.