Large-Scale Analysis of Email Search and Organizational Strategies

Email continues to be an important form of communication as well as a way to manage tasks and archive personal information. As the volume of email grows, organizing and finding relevant email remains challenging. In this paper, we present a large-scale log analysis of the activities that people perform on email mes-sages (accessing external information via links or attachments, responding to messages, and organizing messages), their search behavior, and their organizational practices in a popular web email client. First, we characterize general email activities as well as activities associated with search. We find that within search sessions, peo-ple are more likely to access information and respond to messag-es but less likely to organize. Second, we examine the relation-ship between characteristics of a person's mailbox and their search and organizational practices. People with larger mailboxes tend to organize more, respond a little more, and access infor-mation less. People with larger mailboxes and folder structures search more, but the number of folders has less influence on search. Third, we extend previous work on email organization (e.g., filers vs. pilers; cleaners vs. keepers ) by examining the extent to which these strategies are evident in our large-scale analysis and influence email activities and search. People who rely heavily on one organizational strategy tend to use others less. People who organize less tend to search more. Finally, we de-scribe how these insights can influence the design of email search.