@JohnMay: you already can categorize your mail into folders with the Mac mail client. Mostly I use it to find all messages from a particular recipient no matter what folder I dumped the message into, but it's far more powerful than that.

Anyhow, my main reason for commenting was to exhort y'all to think about the seedy underside of "the next generation of e-mail," a.k.a. spam. Way too much technology is invested in fighting spam, on servers and clients; we struggle with it in managing our blogs, too. You can easily predict that no matter what "E-mail 2.0" you think up with social network technology, the spammers will be trying equally hard to... er, innovate is the wrong word, but I'm afraid you know just what I mean.

Also, I worry that any replacement for e-mail will be just as hard for end users to figure out. E-mail administrators have confided all sorts of pain that they must endure in regard to teaching users (and managers!) to follow perfectly sensible rules about dealing with e-mail... starting with the easy stuff like "don't put everyone in the world in your TO header." The people who read blogs like this are inherently more technical (if not actively geeky); any solution for e-mail has to be so easy that my sister will use it (and she was my primary example for "do not attach 15 photos to your messages").

Esther Schindler

senior online editor, CIO.com