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Understanding email use: predicting action on a message

Published: 02 April 2005 Publication History

Abstract

Email consumes significant time and attention in the workplace. We conducted an organizational survey to understand how and why people attend to incoming email messages. We examined people's ratings of message importance and the actions they took on specific email messages, based on message characteristics and characteristics of receivers and senders. Respondents kept half of their new messages in the inbox and replied to about a third of them. They rated messages as important if they were about work and required action. Importance, in turn, had a modest impact on whether people replied to their incoming messages and whether they saved them. The results indicate that factors other than message importance (e.g., their social nature) also determine how people handle email. Overall, email usage reflects attentional differences due both to personal propensities and to work demands and relationships.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '05: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2005
928 pages
ISBN:1581139985
DOI:10.1145/1054972
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 02 April 2005

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Author Tags

  1. communication
  2. computer-mediated
  3. electronic mail
  4. email
  5. filtering
  6. intelligent agents
  7. messaging

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CHI '05 Paper Acceptance Rate 93 of 372 submissions, 25%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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