Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Stop Organizing Your E-mail, Says Study

People who put incoming e-mails in folders are no better at finding them than those who simply use search.

If you’re the type to meticulously file your emails in various folders in your client, stop, says a new study from IBM Research. By analyzing 345 users’ 85,000 episodes of digging through old emails in search of the one they needed, researchers discovered that those who did no email organizing at all found them faster than those who filed them in folders.

Friends don’t let friends use folders, says IBM Research

By using search, the non-organizers were able to find the email they needed just as easily as filers. They also didn’t have to spend any time filing email in folders, putting them ahead overall.

Other results from the study (pdf) pointed to ways in which existing email clients might be improved. For example, scrolling was a big part of how users found emails, even after they searched for them, yet scrolling isn’t supported by gmail, which uses pagination instead.

The study also suggested that if you want to keep your (and others’) email inboxes tidy, you should do everything you can to keep your conversations in existing threads. It’s an automatic mechanism for grouping a conversation, after all.

The researchers involved found threading so useful that they even suggested a way it could be improved, which they call “superthreading.”

How might we impose higher-level intrinsic organization on email? One possibility is to re-organize the inbox according to ‘semantic topics’. One could use clustering techniques from machine learning to organize the inbox into ‘superthreads’ by combining multiple threads with overlapping topics, using techniques similar to [8].

Superthreading would automatically group every conversation you had with a colleague about a particular project, no matter how many exchanges it was spread across.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

Scientists are finding signals of long covid in blood. They could lead to new treatments.

Faults in a certain part of the immune system might be at the root of some long covid cases, new research suggests.

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why.

And that's a problem. Figuring it out is one of the biggest scientific puzzles of our time and a crucial step towards controlling more powerful future models.

OpenAI teases an amazing new generative video model called Sora

The firm is sharing Sora with a small group of safety testers but the rest of us will have to wait to learn more.

Google’s Gemini is now in everything. Here’s how you can try it out.

Gmail, Docs, and more will now come with Gemini baked in. But Europeans will have to wait before they can download the app.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.