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Supporting Email Workflow
September 1, 2001
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Download PDF

BibTex
Authors

JJ Cadiz

Laura Dabbish

Anoop Gupta

Gina Venolia
Publication Type
TechReport
Pages
8
Number
MSR-TR-2001-88

Abstract

Related Info
Abstract
As more people use e-mail at home or on the job, more people have come to experience the pain
of e-mail that Denning first wrote about 20 years ago [3]. In this paper, we present data from a
field study in our own company to add to the existing body of research about how people use email. We then use these data and prior literature to outline a framework of the five main
activities that we believe people use e-mail for. In particular, we focus on two activities that we
believe have been under-studied: attending to the flow of messages they arrive, and doing
“triage― on a body of new messages. In addition, we outline potential design directions for
improving the e-mail experience, with a focus on e-mail clients that group messages and their
replies together into threads. We present a prototype of such an interface as well as results from a
lab study of the prototype.
Related Info
Related Files
 tr-2001-88.doc
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