Context can groom an unruly inbox.

As important as email has become as a productivity tool, it remains for many a mystery. Wrestling with an unruly inbox can feel like grappling with an alligator in a tar pit.

One reason for that is that many people treat email messages as discrete items unrelated to each other. Imagine a To Do list where for every item completed, six are added. That’s what an inbox can become without imposing some context on the messages arriving in it.

Up to now, tools within email programs to create a context for messages remain relatively primitive, but in the future, they will gain sophistication. That doesn’t mean, however, that even with today’s rudimentary tools a measure of context can be imposed on incoming and outgoing mail.

Most email applications have the ability to create folders and filters for messages. They can be tailored to create context. For example, there are people with whom you correspond that need to be elevated out of the daily din of electronic epistles. A folder for people you report to might make sense. After creating the folder, you can create filters based on their email addresses that will automatically funnel messages to and from them into the folder. By the same token, you might want to create folders for individual clients to capture correspondence between you and them.

Working on a project? A folder can be created for that, too. Within the folder, subfolders can be created for project milestones and filters made to channel messages from team members into those subfolders.

The problem with working with folders and filters today is that the process can be manually intensive. Creating  a folder can be quick and easy, but when you get into nesting subfolders things can get complicated quickly. Although how messages can be filtered–by date, recipient, sender, subject and so forth–is a flexible process in many email programs, creating filters for individuals or multiple subjects can be laborious. As application makers recognize the  barriers these drawbacks create to good contextual organization, they’ll start to address them and make the process easier. That doesn’t mean, however, that investing some sweat in the process now is wasted time.

Another context tool is tagging. Although well developed on the Web, the practice has been haphazardly incorporated in much of the email realm. A problem with tagging is remembering the tags that have been created. Displaying long lists of tags, as some email programs do, defeats the purpose of tagging by making the process onerous.

A good tagging system needs a dynamic search system. That means that as you start to type a tag, your tag list is automatically filtered with each letter you input. So  when E is typed, all tags beginning with E appear. As subsequent letters are added, the list is further reduced until the appropriate tag appears or another one is added.

Moreover, tagging needs to be integrated into the filtering system. For instance, you should be able to send a message with a specific tag to any folder or subfolder, or search messages based on tags.

Although tabs have been a mainstay of Web browsers for some time, email programs have been slow to adopt the practice. Some email apps use tabs as a navigational device. Every time a message is opened, a new tab is created, much as opening a new Web page creates a tab in a browser. A more contextual application of tabs, however, is using them as bookmarks to folders or subfolders. When incorporated in that way, they make it easy to drag and drop messages swiftly into those folders.

When it comes to creating better tools for creating context for email, application makers may want to look at some of the Net’s popular social networking sites. How many email messages are sent every day asking someone for their contact and location information. The ability to incorporate a LinkedIn or Facebook button into a message could be an effective way of not only obtaining contact and location information but for coordinating geographic events, such as meetings, with people from diverse sites or companies.

Context tools need not be limited to individual mailboxes, either. They could extend across the enterprise. That’s a tricky proposition, for sure, because of privacy concerns, but the tools could free up a lot of valuable information that could be siphoned into databases that could be searched by anyone in an organization.

Email has been around for a long time, but there’s plenty of room for improvement in the way it’s handled. Incorporating better context tools into email applications can turn a quagmire of futility into a highway of productivity.