04/22/2020 – Yuhang Liu – Opportunities for Automating Email Processing: A Need-Finding Study

Summary:

This article discusses the e-mail management system. It is well known that e-mail has very important position in our lives, so the authors have developed a platform to help manage e-mail in order to make e-mail severs better. The authors have implemented methods that need study to learn: (i) what kind of automatic e-mails do users want, and (ii)what kinds of information and computation are needed to support that automation. The authors conducted three surveys: designing a workshop to identify categories of needs, conducting surveys to better understand these categories, and classifying existing email automation software to determine the needs that have been resolved. The authors ’results highlight the need to strengthen the following aspects in order to better automate the management of mail: richer data, more management attention, use of internal and external email contexts, complex processing (such as response summarization) and affordance senders. Finally, the authors developed a platform for writing small scripts on user inboxes. In their research, we found that most of the popular mail services are not enough to support automated management, which also supports us to develop new mail services.

Reflection:

First of all, from my personal experience, I agree with that we need a system that can help people manage email to reduce the energy people spend in this regard. Usually during my studies or work. If there is a new e-mail, I usually go to deal with the mail first, which is seriously affected the work efficiency. So a system to help manage mail is very necessary. And I also agree that the authors use three probes to study the needs of the mail management system. Among them, I think there are several requirements that are really urgent, such as richer data model for rules and the leveraging of internal and external email contexts. The richer data model helps to study the content and format of the email. For example, we have another article this week. Marking the structure of the article through people can help the machine to understand the article. Similarly, more email formats and templates Can help the machine understand the mail. And studying the internal and external emails can also better understand the content of the email, and at the same time understand the relationship between the sender and the user. These can be greatly improved. But I have doubts about the system mentioned in the article and the future development direction. Because researching the content of emails and users, especially such in-depth research, I think that it will intrude the privacy of users, and at the same time, I think that the accuracy of management cannot be guaranteed, so the wider application may bring more problems. As an example, I often find that some of the mails that I think are important are considered as spam and enter the spam box and make me miss many things. But I think the author proposes to make people customize in the text is a good solution, however for those who are not familiar with computer applications, whether such customization is really beneficial to their use is also a question and worth thinking about.

Question:

1. What aspects of the current popular mail service system needs to be improved?
2. If we want to build an automating e-mail processing system, do you think we need a brand new framework, or change slowly based on the existing service system?
3. Will automating processing of e-mail cause other problems?