IDC researcher Mark Levitt likens e-mail to "A heavy rain'' where "escalating e-mail usage can be a blessing or a curse depending on how prepared we and our environments are for them.'' For all those who dread to log on in the morning to collect their e-mail it must be a familiar feeling, this storm of e-mails. Because of the nature of my job it's more of a barrage to me. I have something like eight e-mail addresses, all from free services on the Internet (Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, Law.com, Nameplanet, Free.fr, FT.com, Zdnet.com, and Excite.com).

To each of these I have a variety of news services send me their content, so even if I skip one or two days of a certain collection, I can catch up quickly.

We've already had the startling forecast from researcher Forrester that found workers will be spending on average up to two hours a day online to do their jobs. IDC's study Email Usage Forecast and Analysis, 2000-2005, is a heads-up to business concerned about how to manage their employees' time more effectively.

"Effective planning for access, routing, storage, scanning, and related solutions for dealing with the e-mail deluge requires a deep understanding of how e-mail usage will evolve over time,'' Mr. Levitt said in (you guessed it) an e-mail interview with The Royal Gazette . He was good, and replied within 24 hours.

He notes that Web browsers will surpass all other ways of accessing e-mail mailboxes this year. Using a browser instead of a dedicated e-mailer (such as Outlook for example) is to me the safest way to access e-mail from the free services as these will automatically scan for viruses before you download a document to your hard drive -- a sort of personal firewall as it were.

Mr. Levitt advises businesses to take an extra step and manage their e-mails with effective policies.

"Businesses need to be establishing policies regarding what e-mail should and should not be used for and provide filtering tools to help users automatically sort e-mails rather than having to manually eyeball every e-mail that appears in one's inbox,'' he said. "Companies are encouraging employees to delete e-mails that are older than three to six months, but this makes it hard for employees to search and retrieve older e-mails that they may need to do their jobs. E-mail has become a system for filing and managing information and regular deletions of e-mails does away with this valuable role that e-mail plays.'' The most difficult decisions will be in setting policies about the management of employee time and managing personal and non-personal e-mail. A company risks alienating their employees by cracking down too hard on the whip. On the other hand, too lax a policy could result in all sorts of abuses.

Mr. Levitt disagrees with my assertion that many sites turn customers away because of their failure to include telephone numbers in a bid to force customers into the e-mail channel.

"As long as e-mails are responded to in 24-72 hours that is an acceptable business practice,'' he contends. "If the problem does not get solved within 1-3 e-mails, there should be an escalation of the problem to a live agent who can provide a telephone number.'' But to me that begs the question. What if people don't get any response? Or what if the person is about to buy something and wants a quick answer to a question before submitting their credit card? To me a business risks losing a sale if the customer then has to quit the submit order page and wait for an e-mail. My bet is it reduces the chances the customer will return. I know as I've reacted exactly that way.

For those of you with cats that like computers Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona has invented PawSense (http://www.bitboost.com/pawsense). The program is supposed to detect when your cat is walking across your computer keyboard by flashing a sign "Cat Like typing detected'' and sounds an annoying warning to scare the critter away.

"Even while you use your other software, PawSense constantly monitors keyboard activity,'' the blurb goes. "PawSense analyzes keypress timings and combinations to distinguish cat typing from human typing. PawSense normally recognizes a cat on the keyboard within one or two pawsteps.'' Mr. Niswander was awarded the Ig Nobel prize in computer science. The prizes, handed out by Nobel laureates of the genuine prize, are for achievements that "cannot or should not be reproduced''. They are awarded by the science humour magazine the Annals of Improbable Research (http://www.improbable.com) and are sponsored jointly by the Harvard Computer Society, the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Society, and the Harvard Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.

Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, Eduard Mooyaart, and Ida Sabelis won the prize in medicine for "their illuminating report, `Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal,' published in the British Medical Journal (www.bmj.com) last year.

The physics Ig Nobel prize was snatched by Sir Michael Berry of Bristol University and Andre Geim of the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands who levitated a frog and a sumo wrestler using magnets (http://www.sci.kun.nl/hfml/frog-ejp.pdf). One of the best was the public health prize to a group of Scottish consultants in accident and emergency medicine for their article, `The collapse of toilets in Glasgow', in the Scottish Medical Journal.

They describe three patients who sustained injuries when porcelain lavatory pans collapsed under their body weight and warn that as toilets get older across Glasgow more accidents will occur. The authors advise people to adopt a continental approach and hover over seats when using toilets past their prime.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at ahmedelamin yhotmail.com or (33) 467901474.