Large-Scale Analysis of Email Search and Organizational Strategies

ABSTRACT

Email continues to be an important form of communication as well as a way to manage tasks and archive personal information. As the volume of email grows, organizing and finding relevant email remains challenging. In this paper, we present a large-scale log analysis of the activities that people perform on email mes-sages (accessing external information via links or attachments, responding to messages, and organizing messages), their search behavior, and their organizational practices in a popular web email client.

First, we characterize general email activities as well as activities associated with search. We find that within search sessions, peo-ple are more likely to access information and respond to messag-es but less likely to organize. Second, we examine the relation-ship between characteristics of a person's mailbox and their search and organizational practices. People with larger mailboxes tend to organize more, respond a little more, and access infor-mation less. People with larger mailboxes and folder structures search more, but the number of folders has less influence on search. Third, we extend previous work on email organization (e.g., filers vs. pilers; cleaners vs. keepers) by examining the extent to which these strategies are evident in our large-scale analysis and influence email activities and search. People who rely heavily on one organizational strategy tend to use others less. People who organize less tend to search more. Finally, we de-scribe how these insights can influence the design of email search.

References

1. N. Ailon, Z.S. Karnin, E. Liberty and Y. Maarek. Threading machine generated email. In Proceedings of WSDM 2013. 405--414.
2. O. Bälter. Keystroke level analysis of email message organization. In Proceedings of CHI 2000, 105--112.
3. R. Capra, J. Khanova and S. Ramdeen. Work and email email use by university employees: PIM practices across do-main boundaries. JASIST, 64(5), 2013, 1029--1044.
4. D. Carmel, G. Halawai, L. Lewin-Eyan, Y. Maarek and A. Raviv. Rank by time or by relevance? In Proceedings of CIKM 2015, 283--292.
5. M.E. Cecchinato, A. Sellen, M. Shokouhi and G. Smyth. Finding email in a multi-account, multi-device world. In Proceedings of CHI 2016, 1200--1210.
6. L. A. Dabbish and R. E. Kraut. Email overload at work: An analysis of factors associated with email strain. In Proceedings CSCW 2006, 431--440.
7. D. Di Castro, Z. Karnin, L. Lewin-Eytan and Y. Maarek. You've got mail, and here is what you can do with it! Ana-lyzing and predicting actions on email messages. In Proceedings of WSDM 2016, 307--316.
8. S. Dumais, E. Cutrell, J. J. Cadiz, G. Jancke, R. Sarin and D. C. Robbins. Stuff I've Seen: A system for personal information retrieval and re-use. In Proceedings of SIGIR 2003, 72--79.
9. D. Elsweiler and I. Ruthven. Towards task-based personal information management evaluations. In Proceedings of SIGIR 2007, 23--30.
10. D. Elsweiler, M. Harvey and M. Hacker. Understanding Re-finding Behavior in Naturalistic Email Interaction Logs. In Proceedings of SIGIR 2011, 35--44.
11. D. Fisher, A. Brush, E. Gleave and M. A. Smith. Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's email overload ten years later. In Proceedings of CSCW 2006, 309--312.
12. M. Grbovic, G. Halawi, Z. Karni and Y. Maarek. How many folders do you really need?: Classifying email into a handful of categories. In Proceedings of CIKM 2014, 869--878.
13. C. Grevet, D. Choi, D. Kumar and E. Gilbert. Overload is overloaded: email in the age of Gmail. In Proceedings of CHI 2014, 793--802.
14. J. Gwizdka. TaskView: Design and evaluation of a task-based email interface. In Proceedings of CASCON 2002, 136--145.
15. J. Gwizdka. Reinventing the inbox: Supporting the management of pending tasks in email. In Proceedings of CHI 2002, 550--551.
16. J. Gwizdka. Email task management styles: the cleaners and the keepers. In Proceedings of CHI 2004, 1235--1238.
17. M. Harvey and D. Elsweiler. Exploring query patterns in email search. In Proceedings of ECIR 2012, 25--36.
18. S. Henderson and A. Srinivasan. Filing, piling and structuring: Strategies for personal document management. In Proceedings of HICSS 2011, 468--477.
19. A. Jerejian, C. Reid and C. Rees. The contribution of email volume, email management strategies and propensity to worry in predicting email stress among academics. Computers in Human Behavior, 29(3), 2013, 991--996.
20. Y.M. Kalman and G. Rivaid. Filing, piling, and everything in between: The dynamics of e-mail inbox management. JASIST, 66 (12), 2015, 2540--2552.
21. Y. Koren, E. Liberty, Y. Maarek and R. Sandler. Automatically tagging email by leveraging other users' folders. In Proceedings SIGKDD 2011, 913--921.
22. A. Krishnan and S. Jones. TimeSpace: Activity-based temporal visualisation of personal information spaces. In Proceedings of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 9, 2005, 46--65.
23. P. Kristen and R. Lee. Email and the internet are the dominant technological tools in American workplaces. Pew Research Center, December 2014.
24. A. Qadir, M. Gamon, P. Pantel and A. H. Awadallah. Activity modeling in email. In Proceedings of NAACL-HLT 2016, 1452--1462.
25. S. Radicati and Q. Hoang. Email statistics report 2012--2016. The Radicati Group, Inc.
26. M. Sappelli, G. Pasi, S. Verberne, M. de Boer and W. Kraaij. Assessing e-mail intent and tasks in email messages. Information Sciences, 358, 2016, 1--17.
27. H. Smith, Y. Rogers and M. Underwood. Managing personal and work email in the same box: Overcoming the tensions through new metaphors. In Proceedings of HOIT 2003.
28. S. Whittaker, T. Matthews, J. Cerruti, H. Badenes and J. Tang. Am I wasting my time organizing email?: A study of email refinding. In Proceedings of CHI 2011, 3449--3458.
29. S. Whittaker and C. Sidner. Email overload: exploring personal information management of email. In Proceedings of CHI 1996, 276--283.

Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval