Yahoo's Plan for a Smarter In-Box

To many people, e-mail feels like a relic of the early years of the Internet. Messages show up in a user's in-box sorted chronologically, not by relevance; users need to categorize messages on their own; and in most cases, e-mail content--from contact information to data embedded in messages--is difficult to use outside of the e-mail program.

In an attempt to solve some of these problems, Yahoo is integrating a number of new features into its in-box, a move that it hopes will help make its e-mail service more relevant in an age of messages sent via chat programs, cell phones, and social-networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.