Academic papers on email

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood

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Here is my list of academic papers pertaining to email, with my comments. This bibliography dates from 2005. Jacek Gwidzka also has a more extesive a bibliography, although his is not annotated and (last time I checked) was a little older.

• Bälter, O. (2000). Keystroke level analysis of email message organization. CHI '00: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  Bälter captures keystrokes of people using email, and from that, develops a mathematical model of how long it takes people to do things. The key insight is that for large volumes of email, it takes more time to file messages than it saves in later retrieval.

• Bälter, O. and C. L. Sidner (2002). Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox. NordiCHI '02: Proceedings of the second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, ACM Press.

  Bälter and Sidner prototype a system that allows all messages to remain in the inbox, but to be categorized into five groups (which was as many as Lotus Notes let them do), and the inbox sorted by category. Their categories were a mix of who the message was from, who it was to, and the contents of the message. Interviews indicated that people quite liked it.

• Bellotti, V., B. Dalal, et al. (2004). What a to-do: studies of task management towards the design of a personal task list manager. CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  The authors do quite extensive studies of how people keep track of their to-dos (not in email specifically) and describe a prototype to-do management system.

• Bellotti, V., N. Ducheneaut, et al. (2003). Taking email to task: the design and evaluation of a task management centered email tool. CHI '03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  In this important paper, the authors motivate and describe an application that shows tasks and email messages simultaneously in one list-of-messages.

• Bellotti, V. and I. Smith (2000). Informing the design of an information management system with iterative fieldwork. DIS '00: Proceedings of the conference on Designing interactive systems, ACM Press.

  The authors describe the process of designing an integrated PIM, which is basically email + sticky notes + reminders + grouping.

• Crawford, E., J. Kay, et al. (2002). An intelligent interface for sorting electronic mail. IUI '02: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, ACM Press.

  The authors describe grouping messages in the inbox based on which folder it is likely to end up in, very similar to Mock (2001).

• Dabbish, L. A., R. E. Kraut, et al. (2005). Understanding email use: predicting action on a message. CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  The authors studied how the type of a message (request for information, request for action, etc) and the social relationship of the sender affected how the reciever would deal with the message. They got lots of quantitative information.

• Danis, C., W. A. Kellogg, et al. (2005). Managers' email: beyond tasks and to-dos. CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  The authors find that managers organize their folders differently than non-managers: in a more relationship-centric way, with more folders, and with more hierarchy.

• Ducheneaut, N. and V. Bellotti (2001). "E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management." Interactions 8(5): 30.

  In this widely-cited paper, the authors discuss the results of fieldwork that confirms Whittaker and Sidner's contention that email is used for many things besides email, and further shows that people "live in" their email client.

• Flores, F., M. Graves, et al. (1988). "Computer systems and the design of organizational interaction." 6(2): 153.

  This is an early, oft-cited paper. The Communicator was an email system that mandated that users tag messages with what kind of message they were -- request, offer, decline, etc -- as a way of helping people keep track of the progress of a conversation. (While it's not in the paper, I've heard that it was a smashing failure: it demanded too much overhead from senders, and removed some essential ambiguity from conversational transactions.)

• Gruen, D., S. L. Rohall, et al. (2004). Lessons from the reMail prototypes. CSCW '04: Proceedings of the 2004 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, ACM Press.

  This paper has much of the same stuff as Kerr et al (2004). Read that paper instead.

• Gwizdka, J. and M. H. Chignell (2004). "Individual Differences and Task-based User Interface Evaluation: A Case Study of Pending Tasks in Email." Interacting with Computers 16(4): 769.

  This paper is about two things: an email interface and also an interesting way of testing users. The email interface (TaskView) is based on TimeStore, but has explicit indications of tasks in messages. Users had a number of abstract cognitive abilities tested, then were tested on email tasks on two different clients. Broadly speaking, the hypotheses were that better interfaces would help people who scored lower on the cognitive abilities more than the better interfaces would help the high-cog users, and that TaskView was a better email interface than Outlook. TaskView turned out to be better for finding Dates, but worse at a "Header" task. Some cognitive abilities helped, others didn't.

• Gwizdka, J. (2002). TaskView: design and evaluation of a task-based email interface. CASCON '02: Proceedings of the 2002 conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative research, IBM Press.

  This is more-or-less an earlier and briefer version of Gwidzka and Chignell (2004).

• Horvitz, E., A. Jacobs, et al. (1998). Attention-Sensitive Alerting, San Francisco, Morgan Kaufmann.

  The authors describe a Bayesian technique for determining how urgent an email message is, and briefly discuss its use in a prototype Outlook plug-in called Priorities.

• Kerr, B. and E. Wilcox (2004). Designing remail: reinventing the email client through innovation and integration. CHI '04: CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  There are quite a few papers that have come out of the Remail project; this one is a good representative. The Remail system has just a ton of new features, too many to mention here. This paper is worth reading (and is easy to read.)

• Lockerd, A. and T. Selker (2003). DriftCatcher: The Implicit Social Context of Email. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2003, IOS Press.

  DriftCatcher is an email client that displays messages differently depending upon the strength of the social relationship the user has to the sender (based on duration, frequency, and reciprocity) and what type of transaction (based on content analysis of the message).

• Mock, K. (2001). An experimental framework for email categorization and management. SIGIR '01: Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ACM Press.

  Mock has an Outlook add-on with a learning classifier system that assigns a category to a message. The categories are learned by examining the existing user folders. This is similar to many systems (e.g. iFile), but Mock uses the categories to group by category in the inbox (similar to what Overcome Email Overload advises).

• Moore, D. A., T. R. Kurtzberg, et al. (1999). "Long and Short Routes to Success in Electronically Mediated Negotiations: Group Affiliations and Good Vibrations." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 77(1): 22.

  The authors find that if two strangers communicating over email share some personal information first, subsequent negotiations are more likely to be mutually successful.

• Muller, Michael J., G. Werner, B. Brownholtz, E. Wilcox, D. R. Millen (2004). One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects. Chi '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  This is an interesting paper about a groupware tool that is part IM, part email, part contact management, part shared whiteboard, and seems very well put together.

• Neustaedter, C., A. J. B. Brush, et al. (2005). The Social Network and Relationship Finder: Social Sorting for Email Triage. Proceedings of Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, CEAS.

  The authors describe a sidebar with correspondents, listed in social-relevance order, that shows how many messages there are from each correspondent. This social relevance information alters how messages are displayed; clicking on a person takes the user to messages from that person.

• Neustaedter, C., A. J. B. Brush, et al. (2005). Beyond "from" and "received": exploring the dynamics of email triage. CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  The authors report statistics on how people triage their email.

• Rose, D. E., R. Mander, et al. (1993). Content awareness in a file system interface: implementing the "pile" metaphor for organizing information. SIGIR '93: Proceedings of the 16th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, ACM Press.

• Sherwood, K. D. (2001). Overcome Email Overload with Microsoft Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2002. Palo Alto, CA, USA, World Wide Webfoot Press.

  I distill a number of findings from interviews and observations, as well as academic research, and convert them into specific, Outlook-specific techniques for lay audiences to deal with email faster.

• Stern, M. K. (2003). Identifying and Understanding Dates and Times in Email. Cambridge, MA, IBM: 1.

  Stern shows their technique for extracting dates and times from email, and claims an 80% success rate. She appears to use a much more deterministic technique than Horvitz et al do in Priorites.

• Takkinen, J. and N. Shahmehri (1999). Task-oriented restructuring of an application domain: a multi-agent architecture for doing things in internet email. Proceedings of HICCS-32, New York, IEEE Press.

  The authors discuss an agent for processing email in the context of mobile users. Not very interesting to me.

• Turski, A., D. Warnack, et al. (2005). Inner circle: people centered email client. CHI '05: CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  This paper, like SNARF (2005), comes out of Microsoft Research, and does similar people-based organizing, but Inner Circle is much simpler.

• Tyler, J. R., D. M. Wilkinson, et al. (2005). "E-Mail as Spectroscopy: Automated Discovery of Community Structure within Organizations." The Information Society 21(2): 143.

  The authors present an algorithm for teasing out what people are in a "community of practice" from email records.

• Venolia, G. D., A. Gupta, et al. (2001). Supporting Email Workflow. Microsoft Technical Report MSR-TR-2001-88.

  This paper isn't all that different from Venolia et al (2003), though it reports more on the observations leading to their models.

• Venolia, G. D. and C. Neustaedter (2003). Understanding sequence and reply relationships within email conversations: a mixed-model visualization. CHI '03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  The authors describe an email client which aggregates thread messages, strips redundant messages, and presents them in a tree format.

• Whittaker, S., Jones, Q., Nardi, B., Creech, M., Terveen, L., Isaacs, E., and Hainsworth, J. (2004). "ContactMap: Organizing communication in a social desktop." ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., 11, 4, 445-471.

  The authors produced an email client that was people-centric instead of message-centric. Several views are available to show different aspects of social networks, including an email view.

• Whittaker, S. and C. Sidner (1996). Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. CHI '96: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM Press.

  This is a seminal, must-read paper. The authors make a number of insights about how people use email, including: a) that they use email as a to-do list, and hence want to see all their "to-do messages" in one place; b) that people divide pretty neatly into "no filers", "frequent filers", and "spring cleaners"; c) that people need conversational context (i.e. better threading).

• Yee, K.-P. (2002). Zest: Discussion Mapping for Mailing Lists (demonstration abstract). Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Co-operative Work.

  Zest is a hierarchical thread browser, which strips quoted material and which allows expanding/collapsing a subthread. Gmail threads messages in much the same way, but Zest was first.

• Yiu, K., R. M. Baecker, et al. (1997). A Time-based Interface for Electronic Mail and Task Management. Design of Computing Systems: Proceedings of HCI International '97, Elsevier.

  TimeStore is an email client that shows the list-of-messages in a 2D grid form, where time is on the x-axis and correspondents are on the y-axis.