Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "Email Overload" Ten Years Later
Danyel Fisher; A.J. Brush; Eric Gleave; Marc A. Smith
November 2006
PDF (free)

Abstract:
Ten years ago, Whittaker and Sidner published research on email overload, coining a term that would drive a research area that continues today. We examine a sample of 600 mailboxes collected at a high-tech company to compare how users organize their email now to 1996. While inboxes are roughly the same size as in 1996, our population's email archives have grown tenfold. We see little evidence of distinct strategies for handling email; most of our users fall into a middle ground. There remains a need for future innovations to help people manage growing archives of email and large inboxes.

Interesting report, no wonder we are all looking at ways of managing the flow of information and looking to things like aggregators, blogs, and wikis to try and make sense of the influx of incoming information.