> In addition to the financial costs, research suggests that not sorting and managing electronic records makes it more difficult to put together the information

> In addition to the financial costs, research suggests that not sorting and managing electronic records makes it more difficult to put together the information needed at tax time, or for other high-stakes situations, such as loan applications. I understand this as difficulty of finding information which came in emails. An issue with emails which I didn't find in the article is that actively sorting emails by hand takes time and effort, which would better be spent elsewhere. I'd like to see better approaches to emails which won't ask me to do something - after all, email is for me, not I for email. Minimal actions are none - so we should consider fully automatic approaches to email-related records keeping. Emails are obviously sorted by time and "from" address, which already helps a lot. We learned to deal with spam to a much better extent than some 30 years ago - we'd still have it even better, but it's already something. Next, we can sort emails into "responded" and "not responded". Information in emails should be easily searchable, and we're quite capable in that too. Emails should be backed up - that's a significant personal DB which we can't afford to lose. At the same time it shouldn't require us to read all the emails - some of those emails are for future references which may never become needed. I'd liked article more if it focused on these issues as well.