Managing Email: The UK Experience

Abstract

While there are commercial and policy concerns about some of the negative aspects of email, there is a limited amount of research on the issues people face when actually managing their email. The concerns that have received some high public visibility relate to the damage that can be done by viruses and the issue of spam emails, although the latter is problematic in that what counts as spam is itself contested. This point will be explored in more depth later, but for the moment let us consider this to be unsolicited email from people outside of known social networks. However, more anecdotal evidence suggests that there are more issues involved in managing email that deserve some considerations; ones relating to emails from known social networks.After setting the scene by looking at findings from US research, this report aims to examine British people's experiences, evaluations and strategies when managing their email. It brings together the OII's own survey results for the UK and material from an exploratory, qualitative study conducted in Britain, details of which are given in the Appendix to this report. Hence, most of the quotations that follow are taken from a selection of in-depth interviews that examined email user experiences, while others come from staff in organisations asked to reflect on these issues.