Communications of the ACM
Researchers Send Out an Extensive Look Into Email Behavior
Yahoo Labs and University of Southern California researchers studied 2 million people concerning their email habits and behaviors.
Credit: arXiv:1504.00704 [cs.SI]
Yahoo Labs researchers in Sunnyvale, CA, and Barcelona, Spain, as well as from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, conducted a large-scale study of email habits and behaviors involving more than 2 million participants who sent 16 billion messages over several months.
The researchers selected a random sub-sample of Yahoo Mail users worldwide who had at least five replies in each direction. The dataset included messages belonging only to users who voluntarily opted-in for such studies. The researchers monitored the age and identities of senders and recipients, subject lines, when the emails were sent, length, the number of attachments, and the devices from which the emails were checked or sent.
The study found users replied faster to emails received during weekdays and working hours, and younger users generally sent faster, shorter replies. Men sent slightly faster and shorter replies than women, and replies sent from mobile devices were faster and shorter than from desktops; emails without attachments also typically received faster replies.
Regarding synchronization of replying behavior within a thread, the researchers found users tended to become more similar, both in reply time and length, until the middle of a thread.
The researchers hope the findings will help developers create better platforms for email interaction.
From Phys.Org
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Abstracts Copyright © 2015 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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