Information overload will drive e-mail into the ground unless software vendors act now and make major changes to the 30-year-old technology

Information overload will drive e-mail into the ground unless software vendors act now and make major changes to the 30-year-old technology, warned a leading Internet expert Wednesday. During his keynote speech at the Inbox e-mail technology conference, Eric Hahn, CEO of antispam firm Proofpoint, called on software developers to stop treating e-mail inboxes as places to dump memos and start thinking of them as control centers that combine e-mail, instant messaging, voicemail and other communications. E-mail technology has remained virtually unchanged since it was first developed in the early 1970s. But as more and more individuals and businesses have begun to rely on their inboxes to manage important documents -- and as marketers have begun to fill those inboxes with spam -- the system has begun to show signs of stress. E-mail "is broken," said Hahn, who made his name in the industry during his days as Netscape's chief technology officer. "We need to make metaphoric changes." As an example, Hahn pointed to the file-folder metaphor that most e-mail software uses to store messages. "The metaphor was designed back when (we were) talking about getting five messages a day." Today, he said, many people are getting 10 to 20 times as many messages, and filing each one just takes too much time.