What you see when you open a message in Outlook or Gmail isn’t just a snapshot of what someone sent to you. It’s a report. It’s generated by an invisible query and built of select fields of information culled from a complex dataset, then presented to you in an arrangement determined by your e-mail client’s capabilities and user settings.

Dude, your e-mails are a database, and so are mine … and his … and hers. Epic.