No matter where you sit on the IT chain, you are probably overloaded with emails every day. Is it dozens, hundreds or even thousands? Wading through them may take a lot of precious time during the workday, but unless you turn your spam filter way up, the legitimate emails will always be flying your way.

MIT's TechnologyReview last week reported on a technology conference in Denver that suggested taking some lessons from social web technologies to get your email under better control. Lili Cheng, general manager of Microsoft's future social experiences labs, told the conference that email has to be processed more intelligently.

Businesses have access to plenty of tools that can help, including instant messages and desktop searches, not to mention LinkedIn and Twitter.Those tools should be tapped to organize email around special tops, such as projects or certain groups of contacts, she said.

It can be used to prioritize email or deemphasize less important messages. For instance, Cheng said that about 70 percent of the email people receive is information they don't need to read but have on file.

One way to tip off the user about the email received is to create a daily summary by category instead of a free-for-all in the inbox. Email needs to be put in a lot more context, adds Michael Cerda, founding CEO of cc:Betty, a system designed to help organize group discussions. "Let's wake up the data," he told the conference. "Let's bring it to life. If there's a place, give it an address."

Some services are moving in the right direction. Google's email, for instance, extracts mentions of dates and times from email, and offers to move them to a calendar. That's a good idea, but most people need to read the email first and then move it to their calendar on their own, don't you think?

The thing to remember about email is that it's time is just about up. It was one of the original tools on the Internet as it became available to everyone. It may be hard to break an old habit, but it can be done. After all, no one really remembers payphones or the green computer screen, do they?

For more on changing email:
- see this TechnologyReview article

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