Method and apparatus for interaction with electronic mail from multiple sources

An electronic mail inbox uses a mail agent to categorize incoming electronic mail to facilitate more flexible and rapid viewing and possible response thereto. The mail agent is capable of receiving not only electronic messages but tracking data and documents from other sources such as databases, templates and other information, without actually including such information in the inbox. Using either the shadow document generation or document summarization techniques, a surrogate document, including meta data and/or a summary data and a pointer to the complete document content, is generated and placed in inbox. Upon selection of the surrogate document, the pointer is resolved, the complete content retrieved and stored locally and displayed in the electronic mail inbox.