Shift-BOX: INBOX Time Shifting to Reduce Email Clutter
Abstract
In this paper, we are interested in exploring the idea of giving users the ability to shift emails reception time, such as to pause or replay sequences of emails, during a user-selected time window. To our knowledge, email analysis techniques mainly rely on reception time to extract sequential events from emails, such as to reconstruct conversational threads. Time stays no more a physical quantity. Our hypothesis is that giving users the ability to shift time over a time window would help them to better deal with INBOX clutter and reduce email overload. Users would be able to replay sequences of archiving or email replying, and would be less afraid to make mistakes. To validate this hypothesis, we are currently designing a widget to let users re-play email receptions and actions (e.g. classification, tagging, archival, etc.) using a time-centric data stream model. We detail our implementation roadmap and next steps from our ongoing project.