Email interfaces provide poor support for the personal
information management (PIM) activities that users have
adopted them for. This paper reports a user study that
highlights how two aspects of PIM, information
management and task management, cut across a range of
tools, including email. We argue that effective support for
such cross-tool activities cannot be provided through a
focus on one interface such as email alone. Instead, a cross-tool approach is needed in PIM-related research and design. We present a prototype aimed at improving cross-tool support for information management, and report the results from an initial evaluation
