skip to main content
10.1145/2441776.2441922acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagescscwConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

EmailValet: managing email overload through private, accountable crowdsourcing

Published: 23 February 2013 Publication History

Abstract

This paper introduces privacy and accountability techniques for crowd-powered systems. We focus on email task management: tasks are an implicit part of every inbox, but the overwhelming volume of incoming email can bury important requests. We present EmailValet, an email client that recruits remote assistants from an expert crowdsourcing marketplace. By annotating each email with its implicit tasks, EmailValet's assistants create a task list that is automatically populated from emails in the user's inbox. The system is an example of a valet approach to crowdsourcing, which aims for parsimony and transparency in access con-trol for the crowd. To maintain privacy, users specify rules that define a sliding-window subset of their inbox that they are willing to share with assistants. To support accountability, EmailValet displays the actions that the assistant has taken on each email. In a weeklong field study, participants completed twice as many of their email-based tasks when they had access to crowdsourced assistants, and they became increasingly comfortable sharing their inbox with assistants over time.

Supplementary Material

suppl.mov (cscw0512-file3.mp4)
Supplemental video

References

[1]
Allow Someone Else to Manage Your Mail and Calendar. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/allow-someone-else-to-manage-your-mail-and-calendar-HA010355554.aspx.
[2]
ClearContext tames Outlook. http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-9947065-2.html.
[3]
Create Tasks and To-Do Items. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/create-tasks-and-to-do-items-HA001229302.aspx.
[4]
New in Labs: Tasks. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-in-labs-tasks.html.
[5]
Set up Mail Delegation. http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138350.
[6]
Barley, S. R., D. Meyerson, and S. Grodal. E-mail as a Source and Symbol of Stress. Organization Science 22, 4. 2011.
[7]
Bekkerman, R., A. McCallum, and G. Huang. Automatic Categorization of Email into Folders: Benchmark Experiments on Enron and SRI Corpora. Technical Report IR-418. 2004.
[8]
Bellotti, V., N. Ducheneaut, M. Howard, and I. Smith. Taking Email to Task: The Design and Evaluation of a Task Management Centered Email Tool. Proc. CHI 2003. 2003.
[9]
Bennett, P. N. and J. Carbonell. Detecting Action-Items in E-mail. Proc. SIGIR 2005. 2005.
[10]
Bernstein, M. S., G. Little, R. C. Miller, B. Hartmann, M. S. Ackerman, D. R. Karger, D. Crowell, and K. Panovich. Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside. Proc. UIST 2010. 2010.
[11]
Boone, G. Concept Features in Re:Agent, an Intelligent Email Agent. Proc. AAMAS 1998. 1998.
[12]
Corston-Oliver, S., E. Ringger, M. Gamon and R. Campbell. Task-focused summarization of email. ACL 2004 Workshop: Text Summarization Branches Out. 2004.
[13]
Crawford, A. B. Corporate Electronic Mail - A Communication-Intensive Application of Information Technology. MIS Quarterly 6, 3. 1982.
[14]
Dow. S., A. Kulkarni, S. R. Klemmer, and B. Hartmann. Shepherding the Crowd Yields Better Work. Proc. CSCW 2012. 2012.
[15]
Erickson, T., C. Davis, W. Kellogg, and M. Helander. Assistance: The Work Practices of Human Administrative Assistants and their Implications for IT and Organizations. Proc. CSCW 2008. 2008.
[16]
Faulring, A., B. Myers, K. Mohnkern, B. Schmerl, A. Steinfeld, J. Zimmerman, A. Smailagic, J. Hansen, and D. Siewiorek. Agent-assisted task management that reduces email overload. Proc. IUI 2010. 2010.
[17]
Feldman, M. S. Constraints on Communication and Electronic Mail. Proc. CSCW 1986. 1986.
[18]
Fisher, D., A. J. Brush, E. Gleave, M. A. Smith. Revisiting Whittaker & Sidner's "email overload" ten years later. Proc. CSCW 2006. 2006.
[19]
Freed, M., J. Carbonell, G. Gordon, J. Hayes, B. Myers, D. Siewiorek, S. Smith, A. Steinfeld, and A. Tomasic. RADAR: A Personal Assistant that Learns to Reduce Email Overload. In Proc. AAAI 2008. 2008.
[20]
Gwizdka, J. TaskView - Design and Evaluation of a Task-based Email Interface. Proc. CASCON 2002. 2002.
[21]
Horvitz, E., A. Jacobs, D. Hovel. Attention-sensitive alerting. Proc. UAI 1999. 1999.
[22]
Jackson, T., R. Dawson, and D. Wilson. The Cost of Email Interruption. Journal of Systems and Information Technology 5, 1. 2001.
[23]
Kiritchenko, S. and Matwin, S. Email Classification with Co-Training. Proc. CASCON 2001. 2001.
[24]
Kokkalis, N., T. Köhn, J. Huebner, M. Lee, F. Schulze, S. R. Klemmer. TaskGenies: Automatically Providing Action Plans Helps People Complete Tasks. Technical Report CSTR 2012-04. 2012.
[25]
Lampert, A., R. Dale, C. Paris. Detecting Emails Containing Requests for Action. Proc. ACL 2010. 2010.
[26]
Mackay, W. E. More than Just a Communication System: Diversity in the Use of Electronic Mail. Proc. CSCW 1988. 1988.
[27]
Muller, M. J., and Gruen, D. M. Working Together Inside an Emailbox. Proc. ECSCW 2005. 2005.
[28]
Palen, L., and P. Dourish. Unpacking "Privacy" for a Networked World. Proc. CHI 2003. 2003.
[29]
Rambow, O., L. Shrestha, J. Chen, and C. Lauridsen. Summarizing Email Threads. Proc. HLT-NAACL 2004. 2004.
[30]
Sahami, M., S. Dumais, D. Heckerman, and E. Horvitz. A Bayesian Approach to Filtering Junk E-mail. AAAI Workshop: Learning for Text Categorization. 1998.
[31]
Samiei, M., J. Dill, and A. Kirkpatrick. EzMail: Using Information Visualization Techniques to Help Manage Email. Proc. IV 2004. 2004.
[32]
Segal, R. B. and Kephart, J. O. MailCat: An Intelligent Assistant for Organizing E-Mail. Proc. AAMAS 1999. 1999.
[33]
Shen, J., L. Li, T. G. Dietterich, and J. L. Herlocker. A Hybrid Learning System for Recognizing User Tasks from Desktop Activities and Email Messages. Proc. IUI 2006. 2006.
[34]
Takkinen, J. and N. Shahmehri. CAFE: A Conceptual Model for Managing Information in Electronic Mail. Proc. HICSS 1998. 1998.
[35]
Venolia, G., L. Dabbish, J. J. Cadiz, and A. Goopta. Supporting email workflow. Technical Report MSR-TR-2001-88. 2001.
[36]
Weber, R. The Grim Reaper: The Curse of E-Mail. MIS Quarterly 28, 3. 2004.
[37]
Weiser, M. The Computer for the 21st Century. Scientific American. 1991.
[38]
Whittaker, S. and C. Sidner. Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email. Proc. CHI 1996. 1996.
[39]
Winograd, T., and F. Flores. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Ablex, 1986.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. EmailValet: managing email overload through private, accountable crowdsourcing

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '13: Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
    February 2013
    1594 pages
    ISBN:9781450313315
    DOI:10.1145/2441776
    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]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 23 February 2013

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. access control
    2. crowdsourcing
    3. email overload
    4. human assistants
    5. task management

    Qualifiers

    • Research-article

    Conference

    CSCW '13
    Sponsor:
    CSCW '13: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
    February 23 - 27, 2013
    Texas, San Antonio, USA

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

    Upcoming Conference

    CSCW '25

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)13
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
    Reflects downloads up to 21 Dec 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media