This work aims to reduce the efforts of senders and receivers in the email management space by designing a useful, general-purpose automation system. This work is a need-finding study that aims to explore the potential scope for automation along with studying the information and computation required to support this automation. The study also explores existing email automation systems in an attempt to determine which needs have been addressed already. The study employes open-ended surveys to gather needs and categorize them. A need for a richer data model for rules, more ways to manage attention, leveraging internal and external email context, complex processing such as response aggregation, and affordances for senders emerged as common themes from the study. The study also developed a platform, YouPS, that enabled programmers to develop automation scripts using Python but abstracted the complexity of IMAP API integration. Participants were asked to program using the YouPS platform to write scripts that would automate tasks to make email management easier. The results showed that the usage of the platform was able to solve problems that were not straight-forward to solve in the existing email clients’ ecosystem. The study concluded by listing limitations and also highlighted prospective future work.
I found it really interesting that this study provided the platform, YouPS, to understand what automation scripts would have been developed if it was easy to integrate with the existing APIs. After scraping public Github repositories for potential automation solutions, the study found that there were limited solutions that were generally-accessible. I feel that providing a GUI that would enable programmers as well as non-programmers to furnish rules to structure their inbox, as well as schedule outgoing emails using context, would definitely be useful. This GUI would be an extension to YouPS that abstracts the API integration layer away so that the end-users can focus on fulfilling their needs to enhance productivity.
While it is intuitive that receivers of emails would want automation to help them organize the incoming emails, it was interesting that the senders also wanted to leverage context and reduce the load on recipients by scheduling their emails to be sent when the receiver is not busy. The study mentioned leveraging internal and external context to process the emails and I feel that this would definitely be helpful. Filtering emails based on past interactions and the creation of “modes” to handle incoming emails would be practical. Another need that I was able to relate to was the aggregation example the study talks about. When an invite is sent to a group of people, individual emails for each response is often unnecessary. Aggregating the responses and presenting a single email with all the details would definitely be convenient.
- The study covered areas where automation would help in the email management space. Which need did you identify with the most?
- Apart from the needs identified in the study, what are some other scenarios that you would personally prefer to be automated?
- The study indicated that participants preferred to develop scripts using YouPS to help organize their emails as opposed to using the rule-authoring interfaces in their mail clients. Would you agree? Why or why not?
Hi,
I also agree that YouPS would benefit from a GUI. However, I am also cautious that this may end up like the existing E-mail rule generation tools that the users did not like. I think YouPS’s strength comes from, quoting the authors, “hitting a sweet spot between functionality and complexity.” As long as the GUI preserves the flexibility of generating the rules, I agree that a GUI will help a lot.
Regarding your first question, I related most to “modes.” I had not realized it before reading this paper, but I always felt the need for the ability to prioritize different kinds of E-mails at different times.