As electronic mail becomes more popular, users face large volumes of messages in their electronic mail folders. This makes at least two important tasks difficult: triage of new messages and searching for existing messages. Whether for searching or triage, a user would like to find or dispose of the messages quickly, but may not know an optimal strategy.
For example, a user with 100 new electronic messages may scan the messages one by one, spending too much time addressing less relevant messages, and taking longer to discover the more important messages. Similarly, if a search query returns many messages, the user may need to scan the messages individually to find the desired one(s). In either case, the user spends too much time looking at less relevant messages.