Email Users Research Articles

Spam e-mail: how Malaysian e-mail users deal with it?

This paper attempts to discuss the spam issue from the Malaysian e-mail users’ perspective. The purpose is to discover how Malaysian users handle the spam e-mail problem. From the experiences we hope to discover the necessary effort needed to be undertaken to face this problem in the context of Malaysia. A survey was conducted to understand how Malaysian individual perceived spam and what they actually do with the spam e-mail they received in their daily life. The findings indicate that the level of awareness on spam issue in action is still low and need some extra effort by government and relevant agencies to increase their level of awareness. Keywords – e-mail, Malaysia, spam, users’ perspective

소셜 웹에서의 시맨틱스: 개인화 이메일 마케팅 개발 사례

Useful emails influence on consumers` purchase behavior and activate them to visit retail stores. Regular contact with consumers by e-mail has positive effects on brand loyalty. However, email marketing has a limitation. Spam now accounts for over half of all e-mail traffic. The increase of email users has resulted in the dramatic increase of spam emails during the past few years. In this paper, we proposed an ontology-based system offering personalized email services to overcome such limitation. Our method is not the ontology-driven spam filtering, but a personalized content service considering personal interests and relations among people by using FOAF and domain ontologies. Our system was successfully tested in email marketing domain.

On Secure Workflow Decentralisation on the Internet

Decentralised workflow management systems are a new research area, where most work to-date has focused on the system's overall architecture. As little attention has been given to the security aspects in such systems, we follow a security driven approach, and consider, from the perspective of available security building blocks, how security can be implemented and what new opportunities are presented when empowering the decentralised environment with modern distributed security protocols. Our research is motivated by a more general question of how to combine the positive enablers that email exchange enjoys, with the general benefits of workflow systems, and more specifically with the benefits that can be introduced in a decentralised environment. This aims to equip email users with a set of tools to manage the semantics of a message exchange, contents, participants and their roles in the exchange in an environment that provides inherent assurances of security and privacy. This work is based on a survey of contemporary distributed security protocols, and considers how these protocols could be used in implementing a distributed workflow management system with decentralised control . We review a set of these protocols, focusing on the required message sequences in reviewing the protocols, and discuss how these security protocols provide the foundations for implementing core control-flow, data, and resource patterns in a distributed workflow environment.

Rigor and Relevance: The Application of The Critical Incident Technique to Investigate Email Usage

Information systems research is often criticized for its high rigor, but low relevance. One approach to overcome the low relevance issue is to employ sound qualitative methods, out of which this study focuses on the critical incident technique (CIT) that has mostly been overlooked in IS research. The primary goal of this study is to demonstrate and validate the usage of the critical incident technique in the management information systems domain. The secondary objective is to develop a number of practical recommendations for email service providers and to offer novel theoretical insights that may be employed in future research. To this end, 107 positive and 113 negative critical incidents pertaining to email usage were collected and analyzed through classical content analysis techniques. Overall, this investigation validates the usage of the CIT in the MIS field and presents practical and theoretical recommendations.

The tyranny of e-mail: the four-thousand-year journey to your inbox

computer and e-mail were sold to us as tools of liberation, but they have actually inhibited our ability to conduct our lives mindfully, with the deliberation and consideration that are the hallmark of true agency.The first e-mail was sent less than forty years ago; by 2011, there will be 3.2 billion e-mail users. The average corporate worker now receives upwards of two hundred e-mails per day. The flood of messages is ceaseless and follows us everywhere. We check e-mail in transit; we check it in the bath. We check it before bed and upon waking up. We check it even in midconversation, blithely assuming no one will notice. We no longer make our own to-do list. E-mail does.It's time for a break. In The Tyranny of E-mail, John Freeman takes an entertaining look at the nature of correspondence through the ages. From love poems delivered on clay tablets to the art of the letter to the first era of information overload (via the telegraph) to the vast network brought on by the Internet, Freeman answers the difficult question, Where is this taking us?Put down your BlackBerry and consider the consequences. As the toll of e-mail mounts by reducing our time for leisure and contemplation and by separating us from one another in an unending and lonely battle with the overfull inbox, John Freeman -- one of America's preeminent literary critics -- enters a plea for communication that is more selective and nuanced and, above all, more sociable.

You've got mail—an audit of consultant email practice

Aims Communication via email is increasing in the medical workplace and is often used as the preferred means of communication relating to both clinical and non-clinical matters. The aims of this audit were to review consultant email usage and in particular to investigate the amount of time spent on email correspondence per day and if this time was incorporated into job plans. Methods A short questionnaire was distributed by internal post to all consultants at a large paediatric secondary and tertiary care hospital (n=149). Questionnaires investigated demographic information, hours contracted to work, time spent on emails, number of emails received per day, access offsite, time at home reading emails, email access on annual leave and extended role within trust. Results 94 (64%) of consultants replied, 57% were male and 43% were female. 18% were age 30–40 years, 57% age 41–50 years, 19% age 51–60 years and 5% >60 years. 84% were working full time and 16% were part time. 36% worked as medical subspecialists. Time spent per day on email: 3% did not spend any time, 4% 3 h. 54% of consultants received 15 or more emails per day in their inbox. 26% of consultants access emails at home with 10% of these spending 1–3 h per day. 22% access emails while on annual leave. 16% of consultants have one or more work email account. 71% thought time for emails was included in their job plan, 27% did not feel this time was included and 2% were unsure. Conclusion On an average day, consultants spend a high proportion of time answering emails. Initiatives are required to reduce volume of emails, including departmental home pages to post messages and limiting use of reply to all. Incorporation of emails into allocated administration time within job plans would decrease the time used accessing emails from home and on leave.

Email Classification Using Back Propagation Technique

This paper proposes a new email classification model using a teaching process of multi-layer neural network to implement back propagation technique. Email has become one of the fastest and most efficient forms of communication. However, the increase of email users with high volume of email messages could lead to un-structured mail boxes, email congestion, email overload, unprioritised email messages, and resulted in the dramatic increase of email classification management tools during the past few years. Our contributions are: the use of empirical analysis to select an optimum, novel collection of features of a users’ email contents that enable the rapid detection of most important words, phrases in emails and a demonstration of the effectiveness of two equal sets of emails training and testing data.

Potentials 'R'Us web-server for protein energy estimations with coarse-grained knowledge-based potentials

BackgroundKnowledge-based potentials have been widely used in the last 20 years for fold recognition, protein structure prediction from amino acid sequence, ligand binding, protein design, and many other purposes. However generally these are not readily accessible online.ResultsOur new knowledge-based potential server makes available many of these potentials for easy use to automatically compute the energies of protein structures or models supplied. Our web server for protein energy estimation uses four-body potentials, short-range potentials, and 23 different two-body potentials. Users can select potentials according to their needs and preferences. Files containing the coordinates of protein atoms in the PDB format can be uploaded as input. The results will be returned to the user's email address.ConclusionsOur Potentials 'R'Us server is an easily accessible, freely available tool with a web interface that collects all existing and future protein coarse-grained potentials and computes energies of multiple structural models.

Is Your Email Box Safe?

Electronic mail (email) is a widely adopted communication mechanism often used to communicate sensitive and confidential information. Therefore, safeguarding the security of email accounts and letters has become an important issue. There are frequent media reports pertaining to security problems with email accounts. Therefore, studies on strengths, limitations, and possible improvements about email security are essential. This paper examined security and privacy protection mechanisms of four leading email service providers: Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and AOL Mail. A number of observations and experiments were conducted in order to understand existing security and privacy protection mechanisms of these providers. After that, this paper proposes some recommended protection mechanisms, which can be implemented by service providers, system developers, and email users. This study also explores several research avenues for academia.

Too Much E-Mail Decreases Job Satisfaction

In a 50 people company we compared various performance metrics with social networking structure obtained by mining e-mail archives. We also calculated e-mail responsiveness and conducted an individual job satisfaction survey. We identified patterns of productive and less-productive e-mail usage. Results indicate that central network position reduces e-mail responsiveness, while this position in the organization's social network also seems to be correlated with lower job satisfaction. In particular, the team which sent and received the most e-mail reported the lowest job satisfaction.

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.

대용량 이메일 서비스를 위한 분산 구조 기반의 SMTP 서버

SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) 서버는 네트워크를 기반으로 사용자의 메일을 전달 해주거나 저장하기 위해 만들어졌다. SMTP 서버는 대규모 서비스를 운영하거나 사용자가 많은 경우 또는 많은 양의 메일을 처리해야 하는 경우에는 SMTP 서버들을 복수로 구성할 수 있어야 한다. SMTP 서버의 메일 저장 공간인 파일시스템을 분리함으로써 복수의 SMTP 서버로 구성하는 것이 가능하며, 이때 분리된 파일시스템을 각각의 SMTP 서버들이 공유하기 위해 NFS(Network File System)를 사용하게 된다. 그러나 NFS는 네트워크 기반의 파일시스템으로써 파일시스템이 가지는 특성을 모두 가지고 있기 때문에, SMTP 서버들이 메일 저장 공간 공유를 위해 사용할 경우 불필요한 작업들로 인해 오버헤드가 발생하게 된다. 본 논문에서는 소켓(Socket)을 통해 직접 작업하는 방식을 사용하여 NFS를 사용함으로 인해 발생하는 작업 오버헤드를 줄이는 방식을 제안한다. NFS를 사용함으로 인해 발생하는 오버헤드를 최소화하기 위해 직접 소켓 작업을 할 수 있도록, 정보 기반의 저장 공간 구조 및 메일 저장을 위한 프로토콜을 정의하였다. 제안된 방식은 Netscape에서 만든 Mailstone을 이용하여 실험을 수행하였고, 실험을 통하여 제안된 방식이 기존 방식에 비해 성능이 향상되었음을 확인하였다. An SMTP(Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server was designed for delivering and storing user's email across a network. An SMTP server can be distributed as multiple servers for large service, huge users or massive emails. An SMTP server can be constructed by multiple servers with separating file system as email storing space, and each SMTP server can usually share each file system by using the NFS(Network File system). However the NFS is originally designed for sharing each file system across a network, and contains all attributes and features of regular file system. Using this NFS for email storing space of SMTP servers, it makes overhead due to unnecessary work of regular file system. In this paper, we propose a method to do directly operation with socket for reducing work overhead caused by the NFS. For doing directly operation with socket, this paper defines information based storing space structure and a protocol for storing emails. We performed experiments using Mailstone made by Netscape. The experimental results show the performance improvement of the proposed method compared to the existing method.

Do Knowledge Workers Use E-Mail Wisely?

This study investigates the e-mail usage behavior of knowledge workers through an in-depth literature review and a focus group discussion. It finds that people are ruled by e-mail, but think otherwise. In daily usage, many of the weaknesses of e-mail are converted into strengths, and having an information system background does not necessarily lead to sophistication in using e-mail tools. Further, users regard e-mail as a print medium rather than an interactive medium, and it has to a great extent replaced face-to-face communication in the workplace. E-mail users use the medium's carbon copy and forwarding features habitually and not out of necessity, and they do not usually handle work-related and personal e-mail messages separately. Finally, users seek opportunities to learn about e-mail functionality out of convenience, but these are not attained with ease. A contrast between these findings and conventional wisdom is drawn.

Conducting Research Online: Challenges Facing Researchers in Family and Consumer Sciences

A substantial number of consumers now have access to e-mail and the Internet. The growth in e-mail and Internet usage makes electronic surveying an appealing means for conducting research. Researchers and practitioners in the field of family and consumer sciences are increasingly using online surveys to collect data from a variety of target populations. The purpose of this article is to provide a guide to those interested in conducting surveys online and to highlight some of the potentials and pitfalls they can expect.

사용자 클러스터별 이메일 반응 분포 계산 및 사용자 선호 스팸 메일 대응 시스템 구축

In this paper, it would be shown that individuals can have different responses to the same email based on their preferences through computing the distributions of user clusters` email responses from clustering results based on email users` preference information. This paper presents an approach that incorporates user preferences to construct an anti-spam mail system, which is different from the conventional content-based ones. We consider email category information derived from the email content as well as user preference information. We also build a user preference ontology to formally represent the important concepts and rules derived from a data mining process and then apply a rule optimization procedure to exclude unnecessary rules. Experimental results show that our user preference based system achieves good performance in terms of accuracy, the rules derived from the system and human comprehensibility.

Applying effective feature selection techniques with hierarchical mixtures of experts for spam classification

E-mail abuse has been steadily increasing during the last decade. E-mail users find themselves targeted by massive quantities of unsolicited bulk e-mail, which often contains offensive language or has fraudulent intentions. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the other hand, have to face a considerable system overloading as the incoming mail consumes network and storage resources. Among the plethora of solutions, the most prominent in terms of cost efficiency and complexity are the text filtering approaches. Most of the approaches model the problem using linear statistical models. Despite their popularity - due both to their simplicity and relative ease of interpretation - the non-linearity assumption of data samples is inappropriate in practice. This is mainly due to the inability of other approaches to capture the apparent non-linear relationships, which characterize these samples. In this paper, we propose a margin-based feature selection approach integrated with a Hierarchical Mixtures of Experts (HME) system, which attempts to overcome limitations common to other machine-learning based approaches. By reducing the data dimensionality using effective algorithms for feature selection we evaluated our system with publicly available corpora of e-mails, characterized by very high similarity between legitimate and bulk e-mail (and thus low discriminative potential). We experimented with two different architectures, a hierarchical HME and a perceptron HME. As a result, we confirm the domination of our Spam Filtering (SF) - HME method against other machine learning approaches, which present lesser degree of recall, as well as against traditional rule-based approaches, which lack considerably in the achieved degrees of precision.

Fear and Competence in Japan and the U.S.: Fear of Negative Evaluation, Affect for Communication Channels, Channel Competence and Use of Computer Mediated Communication

This cross-cultural investigation examines the relationship between fear of negative evaluation, affect for communication channels (i.e., email versus face-to-face), and self-reports of communication competence. Participants from both Japan (N = 296) and the United States (N = 325) responded to three scales: Fear of Negative Evaluation (Leary, M. R. (1983) Understanding social anxiety. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage), Affect for Communication Channels Scale (Kelly, L. & Keaten, J. A. (2007) Development of the Affect for Communication Channels Scale. Journal of Communication, 57, 349–365), and a measure of communication competence. Cross-cultural differences were discovered on reports of fear of negative evaluation, CMC use, and self-reported competence. The factors predicting channel usage in a difficult personal situation (e.g., competence and general email usage), however, were quite similar across Japanese and U.S. participants.

Automatic thesaurus construction for spam filtering using revised back propagation neural network

Email has become one of the fastest and most economical forms of communication. Email is also one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive applications used on a daily basis by millions of people worldwide. However, the increase in email users has resulted in a dramatic increase in spam emails during the past few years. This paper proposes a new spam filtering system using revised back propagation (RBP) neural network and automatic thesaurus construction. The conventional back propagation (BP) neural network has slow learning speed and is prone to trap into a local minimum, so it will lead to poor performance and efficiency. The authors present in this paper the RBP neural network to overcome the limitations of the conventional BP neural network. A well constructed thesaurus has been recognized as a valuable tool in the effective operation of text classification, it can also overcome the problems in keyword-based spam filters which ignore the relationship between words. The authors conduct the experiments on Ling-Spam corpus. Experimental results show that the proposed spam filtering system is able to achieve higher performance, especially for the combination of RBP neural network and automatic thesaurus construction.

Combining neural networks and semantic feature space for email classification

Email is one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive applications used on a daily basis by millions of people worldwide, individuals and organizations more and more rely on the emails to communicate and share information and knowledge. However, the increase in email users has resulted in a dramatic increase in spam emails during the past few years. It is becoming a big challenge to process and manage the emails efficiently for and individuals and organizations. This paper proposes new email classification models using a linear neural network trained by perceptron learning algorithm and a nonlinear neural network trained by back-propagation learning algorithm. An efficient semantic feature space (SFS) method is introduced in these classification models. The traditional back-propagation neural network (BPNN) has slow learning speed and is prone to trap into a local minimum, so the modified back-propagation neural network (MBPNN) is presented to overcome these limitations. The vector space model based email classification system suffers from a large number of features and ambiguity in the meaning of terms, which will lead to sparse and noisy feature space. So we use the SFS to convert the original sparse and noisy feature space to a semantically richer feature space, which will helps to accelerate the learning speed. The experiments are conducted based on different training set size and extracted feature size. Experimental results show that the models using MBPNN outperform the traditional BPNN, and the use of SFS can greatly reduce the feature dimensionality and improve email classification performance.

Computerized Automated Reminder Diabetes System (CARDS): E-Mail and SMS Cell Phone Text Messaging Reminders to Support Diabetes Management

Cell phone text messaging, via the Short Messaging Service (SMS), offers the promise of a highly portable, well-accepted, and inexpensive modality for engaging youth and young adults in the management of their diabetes. This pilot and feasibility study compared two-way SMS cell phone messaging with e-mail reminders that were directed at encouraging blood glucose (BG) monitoring. Forty insulin-treated adolescents and young adults with diabetes were randomized to receive electronic reminders to check their BG levels via cell phone text messaging or e-mail reminders for a 3-month pilot study. Electronic messages were automatically generated, and participant replies with BG results were processed by the locally developed Computerized Automated Reminder Diabetes System (CARDS). Participants set their schedule for reminders on the secure CARDS website where they could also enter and review BG data. Of the 40 participants, 22 were randomized to receive cell phone text message reminders and 18 to receive e-mail reminders; 18 in the cell phone group and 11 in the e-mail group used the system. Compared to the e-mail group, users in the cell phone group received more reminders (180.4 vs. 106.6 per user) and responded with BG results significantly more often (30.0 vs. 6.9 per user, P = 0.04). During the first month cell phone users submitted twice as many BGs as e-mail users (27.2 vs. 13.8 per user); by month 3, usage waned. Cell phone text messaging to promote BG monitoring is a viable and acceptable option in adolescents and young adults with diabetes. However, maintaining interest levels for prolonged intervals remains a challenge.