whose titles and abstracts sound very interesting, the pile of unread reports continues to grow on the table in my office." (How quaint the terminology: mail and electronic messages instead of postal mail and email.) Then, looking to the future, I wrote with trepidation: "Beyond the riptide of normal business mail lies a tidal wave of electronic junk mail. It is now trivial for any user to send copies of virtually any document to large sets of others. ... The growth of new networks such as CSNET and USENET only adds to the heights of the waves of materials that try to flood any given person's mailbox. It is clear that some attention must be paid to the processes of receiving information, and preventing unwanted reception." In the past quarter-century, the tsunami arrived. Most of us routinely see hundreds of daily email messages. Many come with attached documents or long email threads that someone wants us to read and act on. The Web is so large that we can find thi...
Peter J. Denning