Abstract—Email overload is a term that was defined by
scientists to define a state when users are hardly capable of
managing all of their incoming messages and consequently
their regular work. The first signs of this problem are from
90’s and today we can argue whether much has changed to
better or worse since then. This paper, again, attempts to
describe the problem and unlike other works which
concentrate mostly on its consequences studies the causes that
should be eliminated. A case study was carried out among
employees at University of Hradec Králové to describe the
current state and later the results were compared to another
dataset obtained from the Enron email corpus. The results
suggest that behavior of users has not changed much between
years 2001 and 2012 and the same communication patterns still
occur and cause many hours being used inefficiently dealing
with unwanted emails. The paper concludes with possible
future solutions that would help to resolve the problem should
these undesired patterns be eliminated.
Index Terms—Communication, email, email overload,
patterns, enron.
Miloš Vacek is with University of Hradec Králové (e-mail:
milos.vacek@uhk.cz).
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Cite:Miloš Vacek, "Email Overload: Causes, Consequences and the Future," International Journal of Computer Theory and Engineering vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 170-176, 2014.
