Email Overload: Causes, Consequences and the Future

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.