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NEWS ROUND-UP: Algorithm Predicts Email Behavior

An algorithm from a study of over 16 billion emails shows the predicability in the human behavior of emails
By: Regina Wu
May 12, 2015 —

Email has become a prominent part of everyday life for many people and after looking through 16 billion emails from over 2 million people, researchers at USC's Viterbi School of Engineering can now predict a series of typical email usage patterns. This paper studied factors including user demographic, type of devices and number of emails in a conversation. The results have created an algorithm that better predicts human behavior and can ultimately help improve email management tools in the future.  

Below is a sampling of recent of media articles about this research.

With more than 100 billion emails sent daily, researchers from Yahoo Labs in California and Spain decided to investigate how we actually use one of the oldest forms of communication on the web.

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Electronic mail plays a hugely important role in the lives of a large fraction of the world’s population. And yet, strangely, little is known about the way people use e-mail. How many e-mail conversations do people have? How long are these conversations and how do they end? And how does the volume of incoming mail affect people’s behavior?

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Smithsonian

If you look at your inbox and feel doom and gloom, know that you are not alone. The feeling that you have too much email has an official name: email overload.

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You probably get a lot of emails. Heck, maybe someone even sent you this article in an email. And you have likely developed a systematic approach to dealing with this digital avalanche that never seems to end. Even though email has been around for about two decades, researchers didn't have a good idea of how people were using it. For example, what is the average number of emails a person receives? Do people get overwhelmed by too much email? How long do threads go on?

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Email has been staple of our lives for over two decades, and yet many of us still struggle to manage it. We’ll whittle our inboxes down to empty one week, only to feel overwhelmed as the number of unread messages climbs into the hundreds the next. Are we always an unpredictable mess when it comes to email?

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Is it just me, or is the inbox feeling more crowded every day? Marketers are always looking for new ways to standout from their competitors. So much so, in fact, that it can be easy for them to lose sight of one very important fact: They're consumers, too. And the best way to email consumers is to think like consumers.

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