Email Management Research Articles

Kurumsal İçerik Yönetimi Bileşenlerinin Bir Savunma Sanayii Organizasyonu Örneğinde Değerlendirilmesi

Organizasyonlar doküman, belge, web içerik ve e-posta yönetimi gibi farklı amaçlarla geliştirdikleri bilgi sistemlerini kurumsal içerik yönetimi altında bütünleştirmeye yönelmektedirler. Çalışmamızda bu çerçevede Türkiye’de bir savunma sanayii kuruluşundaki koşulların ve beklentilerin kurumsal içerik yönetimi bileşenleri açısından analiz edilmesi amaçlanmıştır. Belirlenen bu amaç kapsamında geliştirilen web tabanlı bir anket uygulaması ile çalışanların günlük işlerinde kullanmış oldukları doküman yönetimi sistemleri, elektronik posta sistemleri, Web içerik yönetimi uygulamaları ve Evrak/Belge Sistemleri 167 birimden 337 kullanıcı ile analiz edilmiştir. Yapılan analizlere göre; kurumda elektronik posta yönetimi sistemlerinin diğer sistemlere göre daha iyi düzeyde olduğu, en çok kurumsal belge yönetimi sistemlerinin geliştirilmesi, kurumun bütününü kapsayan bir sistem yaklaşımının yapılandırılması ve bu yöndeki farkındalığın artırılması gerektiği vurgulanmıştır.

Gestión eficiente del correo electrónico: una experiencia corporativa

Information overload, and more specifically the overload and associated activity due to the large amount of email received and issued in our organizations, affects business productivity, efficiency, creativity and innovation. This article presents a practical experience of improved email management based on the development of guidelines and tools addressed to creating less mail and more quality, and managing personal and departmental inboxes more efficiently. The project’s goals, its implementation through workshops, and the main results achieved are reviewed.

Email Vector Space Model (EVSM)

Email has become one of the best ever and most efficient forms of communication. However, there are many challenges of grouping email messages. One of the challenging issues of email grouping is to identify when the clustering process accumulates accurate and sufficient information for grouping to be determined. In this work, an unsupervised machine learning technique has been developed based on unsupervised clustering method (UCM) with email vector space model (EVSM). The proposed EVSM is a novel approach as it groups emails in conjunction with UCM. Nowadays, a typical email user receives about 20-40 email messages per day. For some people depending on their job function, hundreds of messages are usual. Thus, users spend a significant part of their working time on browsing through emails. As the popularity of email communication is growing, the time spent on reading and replying emails will only increase which could lead to email overload and unstructured mailbox. As a result, there has recently been a growing interest in creating automated system to help users manage their mailbox extensively. Examples of such systems are PEA [1], MailCat [2], Re:Agent [3]. Moreover, the main tool for email management is text classification [4, 5]. EVSM is a system that implements self learning approach by The creating a space in which both email messages and queries are represented by vectors to automatically create email message groups into one or more discrete set of predefined categories. The key of using unsupervised clustering method (UCM) to cluster emails in combination with email vector space model (EVSM) will improve the performance of the email groupings being generated. Another problem that needs to be solved is the word and phrase similarity in different email messages. An email naturally has no label indicating the group it can belong to. The label can only be set by humans for accuracy, which needs heavy manual labor. This challenging issue is especially significant for email users who need to be labeling email messages frequently in order to manage and organize their inbox. 2. Email Vector Space Model (EVSM) This work developed a novel approach that uses both the structure and content of email messages for email grouping. Since emails composes of a structure in the form of headers and the message body, they can be represented using feature selection and the relationships between various terms (e.g., the occurrence of a term in the subject or body of the message etc) can be represented in the form of a cluster. EVSM has been developed as a viable technique for pattern extraction, frequent words and phrase selections. This approach is based on the premise that representative – common and recurring – structures/patterns/features can be extracted from a pre-grouped email dataset and the same can be used effectively for grouping incoming emails. It suggest that an email dataset consists of representative emails or knowledge sets which contains typically a set of keywords representing a specific meaning, and the structure and content of these representative emails or knowledge sets can be extracted by adapting unsupervised email vector space model techniques to work with the developed UCM. The work also, hypothesise that the notion of clustering is critical for this to work as it helps in grouping similar structures within emails instead of looking for exact/identical matches that may be difficult to find in the email messages.

Efficient E-mail Management System with Bandwidth Reduction and 3-Level Message Prioritization

In this paper, a new e-mail management system is demonstrated in which all messages are prioritized. Each type of priority message is handled with a special method to enhance the efficiency of the proposed e-mail system. Also, a new management technique for user inbox is introduced. In addition, a minor upgrade in TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) message confirmation (ACK) is demonstrated, to reduce the bandwidth consumption. Finally, the network simulator ns-2 is used to evaluate the new proposed e-mail management system. The obtained results show that the proposed system outperforms the traditional ones from points of view of bandwidth, overall system efficiency, packet loss, and delay.

Using insights from email users to inform organisational email management policy

One would expect email substantially to increase organisational productivity and efficiency. There is little empirical evidence of this since email use is such a complex tool that it would be well nigh impossible to attribute efficiency increases solely to email. There is anecdotal evidence of the positive aspects of email (Phillips, S.R. and Eisenberg, E.M., 1996. Strategic uses of electronic mail in organisations. The Public, 3 (4), 67–81; Virji, A., et al., 2006. Use of email in a family practice setting: opportunities and challenges in patient- and physician-initiated communication. BMC Medicine, 4 (18), doi: 10.1186/1741-7015-4-18), and of aspects of email usage that cause aggravation and concern (Whittaker, S. and Sidner, C., 1996. Email overload: exploring personal information. Management of email. In: Proceedings of the ACM conference on human factors in computer systems, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. New York: ACM, 276283; Fischer, D., et al., 2006. Revisiting Whittaker and Sidner's “email overload” ten years later. In: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on computer supported cooperative work, 4–8 November 2006 Banff, Alberta, Canada. New York: ACM, 309–312). Such anecdotal evidence is of limited use in assessing efficiency gains but serves to prompt studies into the impact of the pervasiveness of organisational email on individual employees. To study this, we spoke to email users about their experiences through a series of reflective semi-structured interviews to gauge the effects of email on the individual user. We linked our findings to a number of behavioural principles and assessed whether the identified email-related behaviours should be encouraged, forbidden or modified. We propose one way of addressing unhelpful emailing behaviours to maximise email's potential for enhancing productivity. We argue that such insights from the level of the individual emailer are the key to maximising email's potential to fulfil its original purpose as a productivity enhancer.

Email overload: Exploring the moderating role of the perception of email as a ‘business critical’ tool

The management of email remains a major challenge for organisations. In this article, we explore the extent of the perceptions of email as a business critical tool within an organisation and how the level of such perceptions may moderate the level of email overload experienced by individuals within the organisation. Data from a sample of 1100 employees of a multinational technology firm are analysed using multivariate techniques. The results suggest that without a clearly stated code of email practice within an organisation, there are likely to be large variations in what is perceived as ‘business-critical’ email and, as a result, a substantial amount of email generated within the organisation may not be ‘business-critical’, potentially increasing the level of ‘email-overload’ experienced by individuals within the organisation.

A Review of Text Classification Approaches for E-mail Management

The co ntinuing explosive growth of textual content within the World Wide Web has given rise to the need for sophisticated Text Classification (TC) techniques that combine efficiency with high quality of results. E-mail filtering and email organization is an application rife with the potential to streamline the management of the vast amount of information that accumulates in the inbox. Even though a large body of research has delved into this area, there is a paucity of survey that indicates trends and directions. This paper attempts to categorize the prevalent popular techniques for classifying email as spam or legitimate and suggests possible techniques to fill in the lacunae in the arena of automatic management of emails. Our findings suggest that context-based email organization has the most potential in improving quality by learning various contexts such as n-gram phrases, linguistic constructs or users' profile based context to tailor his/her filtering scheme.

Effectiveness of e-mail management in patients with IBD; a component of selfmanagement.

Effectiveness of e-mail management in patients with IBD; a component of selfmanagement.

‘Dealing with My Emails’: Latent user needs in email management.

Email is a communication channel that provides a number of benefits. It can be stored, retrieved and forwarded. It also allows a recipient to choose when to uptake communication and how to pace it. However, email also incurs one prevalent cost: the feeling of email overload. One of the reasons leading to that feeling lays in the fact that current email clients do not provide an inbox structure that facilitates email prioritization, information structuring and work-flow management. The goal of this study was to understand the latent user needs regarding handling emails. We identified six such needs: three pertaining to email organization (email annotation, reliable structure and no urgency to classify) and three related to email retrieval (informative overview, flexible sorting and efficient search). We further investigated the dominance, importance and dependencies between these needs. The results were then discussed and implications for future inbox design were proposed.

A quasi-experiment approach to study the effect of e-mail management training

This study investigates the question as to whether e-mail management training can alleviate the problem of time pressure linked to inadequate use of e-mail. A quasi-experiment was devised and carried out in an organizational setting to test the effect of an e-mail training program on four variables, e-mail self-efficacy, e-mail-specific time management, perceived time control over e-mail use, and estimated time spent in e-mail. With 175 subjects in the experimental group, and 105 subjects in the control group, data were collected before and after the experiment. ANCOVA analysis of the data demonstrated possible amount of time saving with an e-mail management training program. In addition, better perceived time control over e-mail use was observed. Since the change of e-mail-specific time management behavior was not significant, but e-mail self-efficacy improved substantially, it suggested that the major mediating process for better perceived time control over e-mail use and less estimated time spent in e-mail was through improved e-mail self-efficacy rather than a change of e-mail-specific time-management behavior.

A Framework for Employee E-mail Privacy Within the United States

Employers and employees continue to be highly vulnerable to negative consequences that may result from e-mail privacy intrusions. Given their potentially differing perceptions, there is a need to understand the privacy issues associated with e-mail use. This article first reviews the U.S. legal system to reveal the lack of e-mail privacy protection. A framework is presented to identify the potential consequences under varying circumstances in the workplace, exemplified by classic e-mail privacy cases. The conclusion drawn is that employee e-mail within U.S. organizations is never private, contrary to employee behavior. This contrast indicates a need for change in e-mail user behavior and management policies. In response, suggestions for developing user practices and proper management of e-mail are provided.

Applying machine learning techniques for e-mail management: solution with intelligent e-mail reply prediction

In today’s world, much of our communication is done via e-mail. Many companies and internet users now view e-mail as one of their most critical personal and business applications and would experience serious consequences if their e-mail messages could not be available or experience high volume of messages which lead to congestions, overloads and limited storage space coupled with un-organized e-mail messages. A few years ago, the means of communication are via letter by post, telegraph, fax, couriers to mention a few but now the focus has changed to a faster means of obtaining quick responses and faster ways of communication, e-mails. We propose a new framework to help organised and prioritized e-mail better; e-mail reply prediction. The goal is to provide concise, highly structured and prioritized e-mails, thus saving the user from browsing through each email one by one and help to save time.

Management of Electronic Mail: A Challenge for Archivists and Records Managers in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa

While the use of electronic mail (e-mail) is common in most government agencies, there seem to be no proper systems and procedures in place for the systematic capture and management of this format of records. A study I carried out in Botswana, Namibia and South Africa, which forms part of my PhD thesis, found that most government agencies in Botswana and Namibia do not have policies that guide the creation and management of e-mails whereas these exist in South Africa. This article looks at the use of e-mail in government agencies and how the records generated are handled. Further, the article argues that archivists and records managers need to be seriously involved in advising record creators on proper capture and management of records generated by use of e-mail systems as these form an important part of the organisations' recordkeeping system. Keywords: Electronic Mail, Botswana, Namibia, Recordkeeping, South Africa ESARBICA Vol. 27 2008: pp.72-83

Canadian government agencies develop e-mail management policies

As e-mail has become a widely used communication tool by the Government of Canada (GoC), this article examines current e-mail management policies and system implementation in Canadian government agencies. GoC implemented the Records, Document, and Information Management System (RDIMS) as an integrated system tool for efficient document and records management. RDIMS provides the capability to create, manage, and access information and documents, regardless of ministerial, departmental, or geographic location. GoC presents legal guidance on e-mail management, based on the Access to Information Act, Privacy Act, and Library and Archives of Canada Act. Developing an e-mail management policy promotes an effective capture, management, and retention of e-mail messages.

Information Technology Use in Community Pharmacies in Harare, Zimbabwe

Information technology (IT) has transformed the practice of pharmacy worldwide. This study was undertaken to determine the pharmacists\' IT use, utilization patterns and their opinions regarding IT use. The majority of pharmacies had networked computers (71.7%) and internet connections (60.9%). Pharmacists had poor knowledge of IT (mean rating score = 2.28 ± 0.83) and limited knowledge of the available online resources. The majority of pharmacists used Google for internet literature searches. About 78.1% of pharmacists agreed/strongly agreed that IT had a role to play in pharmacy practice. Internet surfing (89.1%), web browser navigation (67.4%) and advanced e-mail management skills (58.7%) were the most cited pharmacists\' future needs. Harare community pharmacists were found to have poor IT knowledge and generally under utilize IT. More structured informatics training should be given to pharmacists and pharmacy students to better their knowledge and utilization of IT. Keywords: Information technology, pharmacy, Harare, Zimbabwe East and Central African Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences Vol. 10 (2) 2007: pp. 45-49

Exposed: email's worst habits [IT email management

The cost of email inefficiency - where employees spend more and more time assessing, managing and responding to email - is costing UK businesses. Waterford Technologies' research finds that employees spend on average two hours a day 'doing' email. This equates to 55 days a year - or 11 working weeks for every email user.

Investigating e-mail overload in the South African banking industry

The information workers of today have a wide range of information sources available to make valuable decisions, so much so that it can lead to information overload. The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent of information overload in the South African banking industry. The empirical part of this study was done at the Standard Bank of South Africa, where 115 questionnaires were distributed to three categories of employees. It was found that e-mail is one of the most used computer-mediated applications and is used more than the World-Wide Web, instant messaging or peer-to-peer file sharing. Of the respondents, 65% felt overwhelmed by the amount of e-mails they received as 25% received more than 60 e-mails per day. A third of the respondents dedicated three hours or more to e-mails per day. Respondents agreed that the implementation of policies is important to ensure compliance with legislation, protection of privacy rights and copyright, and the filtering of spam. In conclusion, the respondents indicated that formal training in e-mail management should make a significant difference in the usage of e-mail within the organization and reduce e-mail overload.

A Proposal of a Language-Based Context-Sensitive Programming System

This paper describes a programming system with which even novice users can easily specify complex requests as natural language texts, in other words, write programs in everyday language, to operate computing systems. Based on a study of task specification texts written by non-programmers, the processing model is designed so that implicit and ambiguous information in an input text is detected and transformed into an explicit executable program structure. Context dependency in programming is also considered. Context-dependent factors in the situation of program development and the situation of program execution are considered in text understanding and program execution phases, bridging the gap between these two contexts. We have developed a prototype system that deals with personal email management tasks. In this paper, we explain our processing model, give evaluation results, and discuss our proposal’s effectiveness and projected work.

Managing E-Mail Overload: Solutions and Future Challenges

Effective e-mail management tools must treat messages as useful information, not simply as data congesting the network, the hard disk, or a user's inbox. Solutions that economize on scarce cognitive resources at the expense of the relatively cheap additional CPU power, disk capacity, or network bandwidth will ultimately prevail over those that pursue the opposite strategy. With proper application of automatic filtering, clustering, and new user interface metaphors, e-mail can once again become an effective knowledge management tool rather than a source of information overload

FzMail: Using FIS-CRM for E-mail Classification

In this work a brief summary of FIS-CRM (Fuzzy Interrelations and Synonymy Conceptual Representation Model) and its application to intelligent e-mail management are presented. FzMail tool is based on a soft computing methodology for automatic classification of the mailbox into a fuzzy and hierarchical structure of groups of “conceptually related” messages. FIS-CRM is used to conceptually represent messages and it is also used in the process carried out to deal with the incoming messages in order to keep the achieved conceptual organization. The aim is to make an optimum exploitation of the concepts contained in these messages possible. Therefore, we apply Fuzzy Deformable Prototypes for the document clusters representation. The effectiveness of the method has been proved by applying these techniques in an IR system. The documents considered are composed by a set of e-mail messages produced by some distribution lists about different subjects and languages.