Charles Wang, Chairman of Computer Associates International: "It was a disaster. My managers were getting 200 to 300 E-mails a day each. People were so enamored of it they weren't talking to each other. They were hibernating, E-mailing people in the next cubicle. They were abusing it."

And the volume of traffic is still exploding. In 1994, for example, 776 billion E-mail messages moved through U.S.-based computer networks. This year that number is expected to more than triple, to 2.6 trillion. By the year 2000, the number will nearly triple again, to 6.6 trillion. Forty percent of the American workforce uses E-mail.

"It is one of the great innovations of the last 20 years," says Paul Argenti, a professor of management communications at Dartmouth's Tuck School.

If E-mail plugs brains together, it suffers from linking the muddled with the magnificent, banding employees to a crescendoing chatter in which the number of messages increases as the quality of each declines--a world where there are 300 E-mails and nothing's on.

"People became so overloaded they didn't use it," says Silicon Valley consultant Anita Rosen about the E-mail system at computer-software-maker Oracle, where she worked for years. "Out of 300 E-mails, 80% were CCs. So maybe what you actually need to know are 40 E-mails a day, or an hour's work."

Perhaps Gates has spooted an opportunity here. Microsoft is hoping to cash in--again--by selling "intelligent agents" that will help sort all forms of digital clutter, including E-mail.