Email Users Research Articles

An Intelligent Agent for Prioritizing E-Mail Messages

The proliferation of telecommunication networks, like Internet and Bitnet, has promoted mail e-mail into a viable business communication tool with widespread use that traverses all levels of management. In some organizations, e-mail users are being overwhelmed with a barrage of useless messages or electronic junk mail. This interferes with a user's information processing capability and causes a negative effect on usefulness of this communication tool. This paper addresses the issue of time management by reducing information overload in email. A knowledge-based agent, called AIMS, was developed to prioritize e-mail messages. AIMS is different from other systems in three ways: 1 it does not burden users with the task of creating or maintaining message prioritizing rules, 2 it uses a user's personal knowledge or preferences with organizational considerations for prioritizing messages, and 3 it was evaluated at an academic institution with a group of 46 e-mail users who found the prioritized list generated by AIMS highly accurate.

Relating Electronic Mail Use and Network Structure to R&D Work Networks and Performance

This study analyzes computer-monitored and self-reported electronic mail usage and network data collected over time from mentors and their summer interns at an R&D organization. Amount and network measures of E-mail usage were significantly associated with work and work familiarity networks. As time passed, interns communicated through E-mail more outside their formal mentor-intern relations. However, amount of E-mail use and most E-mail network measures (such as centrality) were not related to mentors' assessments of interns' performance several months later. An intriguing exception was how interns were located in the overall Email network. Surprisingly, overall, most forms of communication were negatively associated with performance ratings. These results imply that it is not necessarily how much one uses an E-mail system, but how the users are positioned in that system's structural context, that may affect R&D performance.

An organizational communications perspective on knowledge-based mail systems

Knowledge-based mail systems (KMS) have been developed to surmount the communication barriers of traditional electronic mail systems. However, little attempt has been made to ground these systems in organizational communication (OC) theory. We have reviewed 14 existing KMSs; they provide a framework for classifying these systems in terms of the mechanistic, psychological, systems interaction, and interpretive- symbolic perspectives in OC theory. This framework provides a basis for resolving e-mail usage problems.

Why do users like video?

Three studies of collaborative activity were conducted as part of research in developing multimedia technology to support collaboration. One study surveyed users' opinions of their use of video conference rooms. Users indicated that the availability of the video conference rooms was too limited, audio quality needed improvement, and a shared drawing space was needed. A second study analyzed videotapes of a work group when meeting face-to-face, video conferencing, and phone conferencing. The analyses found that the noticeable audio delay in video conferencing made it difficult for the participants to manage turn-taking and coordinate eye gazes. In the third study, a distributed team was observed under three conditions: using their existing collaboration tools, adding a desktop conferencing prototype (audio, video, and shared drawing tool), and subtracting the video capability from the prototype. Data was collected by videotaping the team, interviewing the team members individually, and recording the teams' usage of the phone, elec-tronic mail, face-to-face meetings, and desktop conferencing. The team's use of the desktop conferencing prototype dropped dramatically when the video capability was taken away. Analysis of the videotape records showed that the video channel was used to help mediate their interaction and convey visual communication. Desktop conferencing substituted for e-mail usage and perhaps substituted for shorter, two-person meetings.

Interacting with electronic mail can be a dream or a nightmare: a user's point of view

Diffusion of electronic mail (e-mail) is not yet universal. So far, e-mail has been implemented successfully within organisations, but its implementation for communications between organisations has been rather limited. This situation is surprising, given the great potential of e-mail for interorganisational communication. E-mail encounters from a user's point of view, reviewed in this paper, suggest that users of BITNET, one of the predominant e-mail networks in the academic world, face difficulties while interacting with e-mail. These include addressing difficulties, unreliability issues, medium limitations, and interface problems. BITNET is just one of many interorganisational networks and may not be representative. Still, e-mail technology is unlikely to survive if human engineering and reliability are not uniformly satisfactory across all e-mail systems. Poorly engineered e-mail systems frustrate not only their users, but also users of other networks because of gateways between the networks. Therefore, e-mail users might resort to other communication media like facsimile or the telephone, and abandon e-mail altogether. For e-mail to be competitive in the communication arena, an interdisciplinary effort should be directed toward standardisation of features like better addressing conventions, international user directories, uniform user interfaces, and sophisticated management of e-mail messages.

Using Text Mining Algorithm to Detect Gender Deception based on Malaysian Chat Room Lingo

E-mail can be a fantasy playground for identity experimentations where players take on an imaginary persona and interact with each other in the virtual world. Therefore, gender deception is difficult, risky and it can be abandoned at will. Inference can be made both from writing style and from clues hidden in the posting data. A text-mining algorithm was designed to detect gender deception based on gender-preferential features at the word or clause level of Malaysian e-mail users. Based on this algorithm, a prototype in Visual Basic is developed. It was tested with 16 documents; each consists of five e-mails exchanges of respective individuals. The tests shown the prototype have 81.3% of accuracy level. This prototype can be a tool to assist interested parties such as the Criminology and Forensic Department, e-mail users interested parties such as the Criminology and Forensic Department, e-mail users and virtual communities to successfully identify gender deception.