Why Forwarded Email Threads are Hard to Read: The Email Format as an Antecedent of Email Overload

Research has shown that excessive email use leads to feelings of being overwhelmed and stressed. Existing coping solutions, which mitigate email overload, address the number of emails and, in consequence, the time spent on emails. These approaches are congruent with existing research on antecedents of email overload. Further coping solutions include addressing email threads. However, we lack a theoretical grounding for perceiving email threads as an antecedent of email overload. I suggest cognitive load theory as a means of investigating the format of forwarded email threads in an experiment. I found support for the effects on reading time and performance in terms of correct answers per second, findings that confirm that forwarded email threads are an antecedent of email overload and that we need a new conceptualization of email overload

Personalised email tools: a solution to email overload?

The stress resulting from the daily demands of email exchange and management has been labelled email overload. The extent to which individuals are affected by email overload has much to do with personal, cultural, and contextual differences. However, in general people are inefficient at dealing with email and could potentially reduce the stress associated with it if they changed their behaviour. In this paper, we review some of the strategies offered in the literature, as well as some email tools that have been developed to help people manage their inboxes. We point out the benefits and disadvantages of them, suggesting that adaptive approaches might be more effective at facilitating email behaviour changes than fixed one-size-fits-all solutions. We argue that the adaptation should be the result of personalisation (controlled by the system) and customisation (controlled by the user) because these processes support behaviour change in different ways

Email overload in academia

The emergence of email as a viable and inexpensive communication channel has led to its increased presence in the daily lives of professionals. Email has become a ubiquitous tool in a faster paced and more globally connected world. Besides simple notes, professionals now use email to communicate tasks, important personal and organizational announcements, meeting requests, and share documents. As the importance of email has grown, professionals have made the email client a work nerve center. The vast increase in the volume of email and the use of the email client as a multifunctional tool now threatens the productivity gains it once created. Business professionals suffer from email overload which is accompanied by stress and organizational breakdowns. As a result, many organizations have created email free holidays and professionals have declared email bankruptcy. In this thesis the research on email overload is reviewed, analyzed, and extended through a study of email overload in academia. Using surveys and interviews of faculty at a large university, the researcher found that email overload was present in academia. The study also identified participants’ behaviors in performing email triage, managing email and email overload, and the effects of email overload. The researcher was also able to discover characteristics of cyclical email volumes amongst faculty which may have a direct impact on determining methods of email organization and the occurrence of email overload. Additionally, the study identified that faculty have extended their email client ever further by using it as a task and project manager, information manager, workload barometer, and headline aggregator

"I check my emails on the toilet": Email Practices and Work-Home Boundary Management

Email is widely used as a means of communication, a task management system and an archive and it often seems impossible to live without it. Our always-online society expects us to be available 24/7 at the cost of potentially blurring the boundaries between work and personal life. Furthermore, mobile and handheld devices have made it even easier to be connected and therefore increased the sense of needing to be available to respond at any time. Whilst research to date has focused on identifying email practices on the desktop, little has been done to understand whether and how the introduction of mobile devices has changed our way of handling emails. In this paper, we describe preliminary results from an interview study that explored in particular the role of mobile devices in email management and work-home boundary management. We found that mobile technology impacts even on the most private of non-work moments. We provide examples of the ways in which technology supports frequent switching between work and non-work contexts, and demonstrate the strategies that people develop in order to manage these boundaries, by using what we call micro-boundaries (e.g. having two email apps on a phone)

Email Information Concentrator

Elektronpost on üks edukamaid ja enamlevinud rakendusi arvutile, mis kunagi leiutatud. Tänapäeval seisame aga silmitsi üha suureneva info ülekoormuse probleemiga. Käesolev töö on osa teadmushalduse vallas tehtavast uurimistööst eesmärgiga info ülekoormuse probleemiga toime tulla. Töö tulemusena valmiski elektronposti informatsiooni koondaja. Viimase eesmärgiks on elektroonilise kirjakasti sisu allalaadimine ja kindlal viisil parsimine, luues näiteks vastava sisuga graafi või Prologi sisendlaused. Rakendus koosneb kahest osast: meilide kättetoimetamise agent ning kirjakasti parser. Mõlema abstraktse mooduli tarvis on loodud erinevaid teostusi. Olulisemad neist on asünkroonne meilide kättetoimetamise agent, parser kirjakasti sisust kindlaksmääratud omadustega graafi genereerimiseks ning parser elektroonilise postkasti sõnumite konverteerimiseks Prologi lauseteks. Programm on disainitud pidades silmas seda, et uusi realisatsioone oleks lihtne lisada ja liidestada olemasoleva rakendusega, kui vastav vajadus peaks kunagi tekkima. Elektronposti informatsiooni koondaja on kirjutatud programmeerimiskeeles Python. Lisaks kasutati ka järgmisi väliseid teeke: 1) Beautiful Soup - HTML sisu parsimiseks sõnumite sees; 2) NetworkX - emaili graafi loomiseks. Valminud arvutiprogramm suudab täita järgmisi ülesandeid: laadida alla elektrooniline kirjakast meiliserverist, kasutades turvalist IMAP protokolli (IMAP over SSL); leida sõnumite seest emaili päise elemendid ja manuste nimed; eraldada sõnumi sisust seal leiduvad üksikud sõnad, read ja tekstilõigud; genereerida postkasti sisu pealt vastav graaf. Lõigupiiride kindlakstegemiseks töötati välja spetsiaalselt selleks otstarbeks mõeldud lihtne heuristika. Mõeldi välja mudel, kuidas emaili graafina kujutada, püüdes vähendada seejuures andmeliiasust sõnumi osade graafis hoidmisel. Hetkel on rakenduse peamine kasutusala teadmushalduse alastes uurimisprojektides, kus selle abil saab pakkuda teistele tööriistadele sisendinfot. Ehkki valmis reaalselt töötav programm, saab seda oluliselt edasi arendada nii jõudluse kui ka lisavõimaluste poolelt. Prioriteetsemad tööd tuleviku jaoks on näiteks sünkroonse meilide kättetoimetamise agendi loomine osana elektronposti informatsiooni koondajast ning meilide ahelate tuvastamine ja kujutamine graafis. Need ülesanded jäävad tulevikku. Kokkuvõttes võib tööd pidada kordaläinuks, sest saadi valmis töötav rakendus, mida kasutatakse juba ka reaalselt projekti teistes harudes. Näen elektronposti informatsiooni koondajas suurt perspektiivi tuleviku jaoks, kui seda sihipäraselt edasi arendada.Email is one of the most successful and widely used computer applications yet devised. It has been around for decades and is used by individuals as well as organizations all over the globe. However, nowadays we are facing a growing message overload problem. This paper is a part of the corresponding research mainly located in an area called knowledge management with an aim to discover possibilities to handle this problem. As the main outcome of my Bachelor thesis, an application called Email Information Concentrator and a corresponding library were designed and developed. It consists of two abstract modules that operate separately: a mail delivery agent and a mailbox parser. Each abstract module has different implementations. For instance, two different parsers were implemented, one yielding a graph representation of the mailbox and the other corresponding Prolog statements. The program is designed to support new implementations for these modules if the need arises. Two external packages are also used, namely Beautiful Soup and NetworkX, for parsing HTML contents in messages and for the creation of email graphs correspondingly. My library includes tools that can extract message header fields defined by RFC 5322. In addition, it can also extract relevant word, line and paragraph information from the message body. A simple heuristic was developed for the extraction of paragraphs from text/plain and text/html messages. Also, I developed a model for representing an Email Graph. My idea is to keep only unique mail message data parts and create relations for the duplicates. This technique allows to reduce the data duplication. The output of the Email Information Concentrator can be used as an input for further research in related research projects. The Email Information Concentrator will be the base for further works in the information management for emails. Especially the Synchronous Delivery Agent will be one of the next steps. It could make the overall user experience much better and reduce the network load as it will download messages which were changed to since the last time as opposed to fetching the whole mailbox. In addition, reconstructing discussion threads remains a challenging but required task. Finally, many optimizations are still pending to speed up the handling of large-scale mailbox traffic. The Email Information Concentrator has already successfully established itself as an integral part of the knowledge managemant research. Other researchers are using it in their branches for importing and parsing mailboxes

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Measuring the Impact of the E-Mail Conversation Format on E-Mail Overload: A Pilot Test

It is well known that e-mails are causing information overload. Existing research investigated the amount of e-mails but does not consider the format of a single e-mail and its cognitive impact. Therefore, we investigate e-mail conversations as one of the most promising formats, which is composed of the quoted history of appended e-mails, forwarded to a third person. Cognitive load theory is used to scrutinize the contribution of the e-mail conversation format on intrinsic, extraneous, and germane cognitive load. The resulting hypotheses and our pilot of the experiment investigate the induction of e-mail overload by e-mail conversations. By successfully validating our measurement instruments we gain first indications of construct validity. As a result we present an exploratory factor analysis, a confirmatory factor analysis, and an assessment of the model fit. Subsequently, we reflect on our findings and present the implications for future research

Collaboration sociale d'entreprise : Le réveil du courrier électronique ?

National audienceThis article studies the persistence of email while enterprise social collaborative tools are more and more promoted within firms: Can this be purely explained by the fear of change, or should other factors be considered? We claim here first that some important capabilities of messaging are lacking in enterprise social tools and second that email could be enhanced by adding new social capabilities. The first point is studied by a theoretical comparison of the different tools; the second point by a prototype followed by experimentation. This work leads to the conclusion that there are still some distinctive capabilities of messaging, which could explain its persistence, and also that email can remain a foundation to implement new social capabilities. These results open new research perspectives, and provide learnings to practitioners for the deployment of collaborative features for enterprises.Cet article part du constat de la persistance des usages de la messagerie électronique à l'heure des outils sociaux collaboratifs d'entreprise : est-elle uniquement explicable par des résistances au changement, ou d'autres facteurs doivent-ils être considérés ? Nous formulons ici les hypothèses que certaines capacités importantes de la messagerie manquent aux outils sociaux, puis que la messagerie peut être améliorée par l'ajout de nouvelles capacités sociales. La première hypothèse est étudiée par une comparaison théorique des différentes capacités des outils en présence ; la seconde par un prototypage suivi d'une expérimentation. Ces travaux concluent d'une part à l'existence de capacités distinctives de la messagerie susceptibles d'expliquer la persistance de son usage, et d'autre part à la possibilité de partir de l'email pour mettre en oeuvre de nouvelles capacités sociales, ouvrant ainsi des perspectives de recherche sur ce sujet, mais fournissant également des indications aux praticiens pour le déploiement de fonctions collaboratives dans les entreprises

A Survey of Existing E-mail Spam Filtering Methods Considering Machine Learning Techniques

E-mail is one of the most secure medium for online communication and transferring data or messages through the web. An overgrowing increase in popularity, the number of unsolicited data has also increased rapidly. To filtering data, different approaches exist which automatically detect and remove these untenable messages. There are several numbers of email spam filtering technique such as Knowledge-based technique, Clustering techniques, Learningbased technique, Heuristic processes and so on. This paper illustrates a survey of different existing email spam filtering system regarding Machine Learning Technique (MLT) such as Naive Bayes, SVM, K-Nearest Neighbor, Bayes Additive Regression, KNN Tree, and rules. However, here we present the classification, evaluation and comparison of different email spam filtering system and summarize the overall scenario regarding accuracy rate of different existing approache