E-mail, the internet's killer app, is killing productivity. Even for workers who insulate themselves from pitches for porn and pills--up 59% in October from the previous month, according to e-mail management company Postini--occupational spam takes a toll: Mailing list messages, workgroup updates, e-mail alerts, and corporate communiqués demand attention, if not a reply.

Dealing with e-mail easily can become a full-time job. Heavy users receive 1,000 messages and 1,500 spam messages a week, estimates Richi Jennings, lead analyst with the e-mail security practice at Ferris Research.

E-mail applications "were never designed for people to get 100 e-mails a day," laments Anil Dash, VP of professional products for blogging software company Six Apart. Some people get more than that, some less. But there's no getting around the fact that it's getting harder to process all the incoming information. Where once AOL's "You've Got Mail!" was an affirmation of popularity, today it sounds like an unwelcome diagnosis.

To get things done, knowledge workers are adopting more manageable forms of messaging like blogs and wikis. And as organizations attempt to coordinate dispersed groups around the world, they're adopting blogs, wikis, and other collaborative communication software to make messaging manageable. E-mail apps often have limited searching, sorting, filtering, and customizing features, as well as list-oriented interfaces that become unwieldy under large loads. But group collaboration software gives users more control and better tools for defining how incoming information gets processed and presented.

TOTAL BREAKDOWN

"E-mail is totally broken for me, as it is for many other people," says D.L. Byron, principal at Textura Design and the author of Publish And Prosper: Blogging For Your Business (New Riders Press, 2006). Textura Design, a Web design company and business blogging provider, went with Basecamp, online project management software from 37signals that's similar to blog and wiki software, Byron says. It provides a central online repository for shared files, persistent communication, and project goal tracking.

Not only does Textura Design use it internally, but Byron insists that the company's clients, many of whom have firewalls on their corporate networks that get in the way of exchanging files, use it to communicate about projects.

Six Apart, maker of Movable Type blogging software, is seeing companies deploy blogs to communicate with customers and internally to track projects. "E-mail has been overused and abused for project management in organizations," says Christopher Alden, executive VP and general manager of Movable Type. "Yet the reason people use e-mail is because it's easy, it's lightweight, it's quick. No one's nervous about authoring an e-mail. So blogs are hitting that middle zone in many different ways."