Catherine Grevet
ABSTRACT
The term email overload has two definitions: receiving a large volume of incoming email, and having emails of different status types (to do, to read, etc). Whittaker and Sidner proposed the latter definition in 1996, noticing that email inboxes were far more complex than simply containing incoming messages. Sixteen years after Whittaker and Sidner, we replicate and extend their work with a qualitative analysis of Google's Gmail. We find that email overload, both in terms of volume and of status, is still a problem today. Our contributions are 1) updating the state of email overload, 2) extending our understanding of overload in the context of Gmail and 3) comparing personal with work email accounts: while work email tends to be status overloaded, personal email is also type overloaded. These comparisons between work and personal email suggest new avenues for email research.
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Index Terms
- Overload is overloaded: email in the age of Gmail
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