Summary
Park et al.’s paper covers the thankless task of email management. They discuss how people spend too much time reading and responding to emails, and how it might be nice to get some sort of automation going for dealing with the deluge of electronic ascii flooding our days. In their process, they interviewed 13 people in a design workshop setting where they came up with 42 different rules for dealing with emails. From these rules, they identified five different overarching categories for these rules. Using this data, the authors then sent a survey out and received 77 responses on how they would use a “smart robot” to handle their emails. They identified 6 categories of possible automation from this survey. The authors then took to GitHub to find any existing automation that coders have come up with to deal with email through searching for codebases that messed with IMAP standards. This came up with 8 different categories. They then took all of the data thus far and created an email automation tool they called YouPS (cute), and identified how today’s email clients needed to adjust to fully handle the wanted automation.
Personal Reflection
I have to admit, when I first saw that they specified they gathered 13 “email users,” I laughed. Isn’t that just “people?” Furthermore, a “smart robot” is just a machine learning algorithm. The entire premise of calling their mail handler “YouPS.” This paper was full of funny little expressions and puns that I aspire to create one day.
While I liked that they found that senders wanted recipients to have an easier time dealing wither their email, I wasn’t terribly surprised about that. If I wanted a reply to an email, I’d rather they get the email and be able to deal with it immediately rather than risking them forgetting about my request altogether. That’s the best of both worlds, where all parties involved have the right amount of time to apply to pressing concerns.
I also appreciated that they were able to get responses from non-university affiliated people, as it’s often the case that research is found too narrowly focused on college students.
Lastly, I enjoyed the abstraction they created with their YouPS system. While it was essentially just an API that allowed users to use standard python with an email library, it seemed genuinely useful for many different tasks.
Questions
- What is your biggest pet peeve about the way email is typically handled? How might automation solve that issue?
- Grounded Theory is a method that pulls a ton of data out of written or verbal responses, but requires a significant effort. Did the team here effectively use grounded theory, and was it appropriate for this format? Why or why not?
- How might you solve sender issues in email? Is it a worthwhile goal, or is dealing with those emails trivial?
- What puns can you create based on your own research? Would you use them in your papers? Would you go so far as to include them in the titles of your works?
I have a similar view when it comes to being a sender of an email. I always make sure that for important emails, I send out only during the business hours. Especially for official email, say like the Graduate School, I would rather schedule to email to 9AM the next morning than to send it the night before. I have also seen senders asking for “read receipts” as a way to ensure they don’t send the same email more than once to the same recipient.