A few corporate divisions ask workers to ignore incoming E-mail and voice mail during specific times of day to concentrate on the business at hand.

This means that the box can receive and store frequently requested information, like weather reports, movie listings and incoming E-mail, even before you ask for it.

A POP3 server, if you've ever wondered about the term (you may have seen it in your E-mail program's settings box or as an occasional flash on-screen as the program checks your mail) is where incoming E-mail sits until you log on to download it.

Netscape and Yahoo will forward copies of incoming E-mail to a pager, handy for E-store owners on the run.

It also uses voice synthesis to read traffic reports, incoming E-mail and the driver's personal contact directory.

The new program is known as a worm rather than a virus because it is self-propagating from computer to computer through networks, in this case by generating a reply to each incoming E-mail.

Even among those companies, which average 500 incoming E-mails a day, dealing with the deluge can be confusing, with responsibility split among departments.

Mr. Shiva added that the slow adoption of systems to handle incoming E-mail had "a lot to do with technology but also with process and elevation of consciousness - even politics going on within companies."

This fanfare seems warranted if the incoming E-mail has a poetic subject line, like the recent "When in doubt, revert to pig Latin."