Beyond “From” and “Received”: Social Sorting for Email Triage

Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. Email triage can quickly become a serious problem for users as the amount of unhandled email grows. We investigate the problem of email triage by first presenting interview and survey results that articulate user needs for email triage. We then use these results to outline a set of implications for the design of software to support email triage and present a prototype design which illustrates these principles. Our prototype aggregates social meta-data about email correspondents and places email triage within the user’s social context by providing social sorting of email items using additional meta-data elements.