Marked for deletion: an analysis of email data

ABSTRACT

What characteristics of an email message make it more likely to be discarded? Statistical analyses of a set of deleted and non-deleted messages revealed several factors that were important in predicting the fate of a message. After controlling for the owner of the particular message, four factors turned out to be most important: history of communication with the sender (messages sent to and messages received from), intra-organizational vs. external sender, and size of the recipient group.

REFERENCES

• 1: Nicolas Ducheneaut , Victoria Bellotti, E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management, interactions, v.8 n.5, p.30-38, Sept./Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/382899.383305]
• 2: Horvitz, E., Jacobs, A., and Hovel, D. (1999). Attention-sensitive alerting. Proceedings of UAI '99, Conference on Uncertainty and Artificial Intelligence.
• 3: Steve Whittaker , Candace Sidner, Email overload: exploring personal information management of email, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.276-283, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238530]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Electronic mail

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human information processing; Human factors
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing

Keywords:
CMC, electronic mail, email, filtering, messaging