Boxes and Arrows: The Information Architecture of Email

Blake writes The Information Architecture of Email takes a look at, well, The Information Architecture of Email. The author, Dan Brown, says Email is hard to sort into a strict taxonomy because: Most messages could live in more than one category, and, Personal and business priorities may shift several times a year, rendering email taxonomies obsolete.
He takes a look at how Gmail is different: “As Gmail comes out of Beta, Google may find itself with a product that users are slow to adopt. People may find the subtle change in the email paradigm more dramatic than Google anticipated. Perhaps this speaks to the dangers of bad design: a bad product can just as easily become entrenched as rejected, such that when a better one comes along, users are reluctant to adopt it.“”