A measure of industrial progress is the speed with which inventions grow insufferable. The elevator, once a marvel of efficiency, has become a social purgatory from which most of us cannot escape too quickly. The builders of the first commercial airplane couldn’t have foreseen the crushed knees and the splattered salad dressings that their machine would visit on the world. “Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being,” John Stuart Mill wrote in the “Principles of Political Economy” (1848), and the precept holds for recent innovations, too. Think of e-mail. Or, rather, try not to think of e-mail, since, chances are, while you floss, steep tea, make love, or read these sentences, new messages are proliferating in your inbox, colonizing your time and your brain. Sure thing, you type back to a needy stranger who seems unable to punctuate. Sounds good. Actually, it sounds like death. Once upon a time, you knew that you could log off e-mail and, like Cinderella before midnight, gain a few hours of deliverance from the day’s digital scut work. Now your inbox nags you on your smartphone, and the only prince who might help is Nigerian, with a need to stow his fortune somewhere safe.

Add to this the knowledge that your e-mail self is probably your worst. “Exposure of my emails would reveal not only deep fears and worries, but also my shallow personality,” the writer Delia Ephron fretted in a comic essay, after Sony, where she’d done business, had its accounts hacked. That was in 2014, and the stakes of inbox security have risen since, even as standards of conduct grow vague. By some accounts, it was a popular obsession with Hillary Clinton’s inbox which cost her the election. By others, it was WikiLeaks’ release of messages from the Democratic National Committee. E-mails from the Vice-President’s former account showed up in March (divulging the Second Lady’s private contact information), and, in May, hackers delivered a cache from Emmanuel Macron’s campaign inboxes in the apparent hope of swaying voters. (The press held back, and the people of France, who appear to prefer their epistolary scandals served blue, shrugged.) E-mail made the news again last week, when the Times reported that a message from 2016 offered Donald Trump, Jr., opposition information from Russia. Then Trump fils released his e-mail thread online.

Given that e-mail leaks can imperil governments, it seems odd that correspondents spend so little time reviewing basic work before they press send. Writing, along with fire-making and the invention of the wheel, is widely held to be a milestone of human progress. This view will seem naïve to anybody who has read much human writing. In its feral form, prose is unhinged, mystifying, and repetitive. Writers feel moved to “get things down on paper,” usually incoherently, and even in guarded moods say alarming stuff because they don’t know where to put their commas. (“Time to eat children!”) The true wellspring of civilization isn’t writing; it is editing. E-mail, produced in haste, rarely receives the requisite attention. That is bad for us but good for posterity—and for students of the literary gestures we imprudently put in pixels. When inboxes are gathered, cracked open, and studied, they become a searchable, sortable atlas for the contours of our social minds.

Not long after the Enron Corporation imploded amid revelations of accounting fraud, in 2001, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission seized the e-mail folders of a hundred and fifty-one mostly high-ranking employees, the better to discover the discoverable. Before long, the commission made a startling announcement: it would release this body of e-mail online, to substantiate its findings. “The release of the information now will enable the public to understand better the evidentiary record on which the Commission’s decisions in those proceedings are grounded,” it explained. “The Commission may release the information if the public’s right to disclosure outweighs the individual’s right to privacy.”

The Enron archive came to comprise hundreds of thousands of messages, and remains one of the country’s largest private e-mail corpora turned public. Its lasting value is less as an account of Enron’s daywork than as a social and linguistic data pool, a record of the way we write online when we’re not preening for the public eye. Like a hot-dog bun beset by seagulls, the archive has been pulled apart and pecked up; it has been digested by computers and referred to by more than three thousand academic papers. This makes it, in the annals of scholarship, something strange: a canonic research text that no one has actually read.

Mostly, that’s because it is too long, and too boring, for complete human consumption. When the e-mails were released, in 2003, the dump was more jumbled than even computers could handle, so a researcher at M.I.T. purchased the bundle and, with help, began to put it in a processable order. Folder structures were reinstated. Redundancies, automated messages from Listservs, delivery-failure notices, and other pieces of modern detritus were trimmed away.

The resulting corpus, down to a few hundred thousand e-mails, helped to mark a shift in research premise from the cult of authorship (these texts are interesting because a notable mind made them) to the cult of the commons (these texts are interesting because of what, together, they show). The things they show frequently serve the cause of automation. One of the first projects to employ the Enron corpus was a self-described “extensive benchmark study of e-mail foldering.” It used seven large accounts to help determine whether people organized their e-mail in ways that might be replicable by machine intelligence. (“Email foldering is a rich and interesting task,” the study’s lead author, Ron Bekkerman, noted, in what may be the paper’s most surprising conclusion.) The answer was not yet: people are too idiosyncratic in the ways they organize their stuff. Another team used the corpus to develop a “compliance bot” that could identify sensitive elements in text and alert writers if a message might get them in trouble.

These endeavors served a basic purpose: protecting users from their foolishness. Other studies focussed on Enron itself. Noting that “a small number of users have sent a large number of messages”—a fact that will shock no one who gets e-mail at work—one research team mapped epistolary ties on a Gower layout (a connect-the-dots plot) to understand who was in contact with whom. They found a tight nest of connections around Enron’s president, vice-president, and C.E.O. Angled off to either side were ears with more remote networks of traders, managers, and lawyers. The plot looks like a donkey head.

It also looks more or less like what you’d expect. The corpus rapidly highlights the difference between rich data and useful information. An M.I.T. student working on a compliance bot noted that it seemed nearly impossible to identify evidence of financial misconduct using basic search strings. He had more success tracking down pornography—of which there was, oddly, a lot—with words like “sex.” Also, it was easy to find racial slurs.

Computers can do little with a text that humans could not, but they make some laborious work go faster. In 1949, an Italian Jesuit priest named Roberto Busa presented a pitch to Thomas J. Watson, of I.B.M. Busa was trained in philosophy, and had just published his thesis on St. Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic theologian with a famously unmanageable œuvre. (Work on a multivolume critical edition of Aquinas’s philosophy, commissioned by the Vatican, began in 1879 and is nowhere near done.) Busa had begun to wonder whether Watson’s computing machines could aid his work. Watson backed him, and, for the next thirty years, Busa encoded sixty-five thousand pages of Thomist text so that it could be word-searched, cross-referenced, and what we now call hyperlinked. The Index Thomisticus was the first corpus to be primed for digital scholarship, no less impressive because it started on punch cards and ended up online. “Digitus Dei est hic!” Busa punned in 2004. The finger of God is here.