Consequences of Ubiquitous Connectivity Virtuall y the entire globe has a path to our desktops 24x7. As senders, we can easily send information directly to a recipient's inbox. As recipients, we must read every message to determine the next action. While the speed and means of e-mail delivery have improved, the ease of interpretation has not, costing corporate America millions of dollars annually in lost productivity. Most of our clients want to close the e-mail floodgates, while still keeping informed by having only selected information pushed to them. Smart-messaging assistants can help them accomplish that.

We frequently use agents in Lotus Notes Mail to review e-mail, discard as much as possible, reply to others and then funnel the remainder into folders. News agents, a type of agent unique to Lotus Notes, summarize the contents of messages that meet your specific search criteria. The news agent will send you a single e-mail with these summaries along with active links to each original message.

Smart-messaging tools can help you comply effecti vely with federal regulations. For example, one of our clients, a large government aviation agency, uses Peloria Technology Corp.'s Mail Scout Mail Assistant to automatically copy and archive all e-mail communications. And a Circuit Court of Appeals client meets its privacy and security requirements by using agents that read e-mail and selectively filter communications based on content. This protects judges from seeing information that might constitute a conflict of interest.

How Smart Messaging Works Smart-messaging components fall within four architectural categories: rules, filters, agents and intelligent agents. Rules generally apply to outgoing mail or complex incoming mail processing. Filters screen, file or delete inbound mail. Agents are used to automatically reply to messages, track past-due messages and next actions, and confirm meeting invitations on your behalf while updating your personal calendar in the process.

Finally, intelligent agents for messaging watch the way you work, learn your style and automatically interact with the messaging environment by spontaneously assisting with the management of communications. For example, if you always read e-mail from Greg Fisk first, regardless of its priority, an intelligent agent watching how you manage your e-mail would pick up on this and move Greg Fisk's e-mail to the top of your view. It may even offer to automatically forward these messages to your wireless pager or PCS (Personal Communications System) phone.

Although intelligent agents for messaging are not available in commercial form as of this writing, some level of rules, filters and agents can be found in almost every mail client on the market. To evaluate the various architectures and primary features available, we looked at solutions from Banyan Systems, which pioneered the use of rules in 1989 with its BeyondMail product; Lotus Development Corp., with its cc:Mail Rules and Notes Agents; and Peloria Technology's MailScout for cc:Mail.

To benefit from smart messaging, you must first build or define the rules, filters and agents you will use. All these elements follow the same basic defining structure (see "Where Are the Messages Processed?" below).