Reshaping Email Relationships

Eyas El-Qawasmeh

Jordan University of Science

and Technology, Jordan

eyas@just.edu.jo

Vaclav Snasel

VSB-Technical University of,

Czech Republic

Vaclav.snasel@vsb.cz

Pit Pichappan Al Imam University, Saudi Arabia

pichappan@dirf.org

Abstract

This paper suggests splitting the existing email handlers

into more than one group. The existing group can be

considered as a group that has one-to-one relationship.

However, this paper suggests that the email handlers should give the user the choice to select the relation that

he would like to implement in the email handler. Three

types of relationships can be identified. They are: one-to-

one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationship.

Enforcing a certain type of relationship saves the time of the emailer. The paper will describe the prototype for

each relationship with the advantages of each one.

1. Introduction

Currently, the email is considered a very powerful and

common tool for communications[5]. The free cost of

using it and the speed of it is one of the key factors that

make the email an influential factor in the world of

communications[1] [2] [3]. In addition, the increased

width of Internet lines and other advances in the web

technologies give more promotion to the email and make

the email a necessary element for any successful business.

The early use of the email is a text email that a user

sends to his friend or to a certain organization and vice

versa. However, the expansion of business and the heavily

dependence on the online communications leads to email

with different kinds of attachments and different degrees

of importance to the receiver. This creates the necessity

for re-studying the email and re-structuring it. Especially

for organizations/companies where one of them must

handle hundreds of different emails that it receives daily.

The first view is the sender view. The second view is

the receiver view. In the sender view, a person sends

email to his friend or to a workplace. We will call the

relation in this email a one-to-one. A second relation is a

person sends to many receivers. We can call the

relationship in this a one-to-many relation. This is very

clear when a person send to all his friends through the

address book. Although this is considered one-to-many

relation, but the sender mostly wants to express just one

message, therefore, he does not need to customize each

message. Instead, he sends one generic message with a

bcc to all whom he is interested to reach. Therefore, this

relation which is one-to-many relationship will be turned

into one-to-one in many cases and it is not time

consuming. A simple example is when a person sends the

same greeting message to all people listed in his address

book. A third relationship which we call many-to-many

does not exist in the individual site if he is a sender.

Sending an email from one-to-many is not a problem if

the view is from the sender site since the same message

mostly will be delivered to many people without any

changes in its contents. However, if the sender is an

organization or a workshop or a government office, then it

is mostly responding to the emails that it receives, and in

this case, we should consider the receiving point of view.

The receiver receives different hundred of emails and it

respond to them. However, most messages of the email

are individualized and they require a customized response

from the receiver. This creates a very heavy load on the

workplace [4] and this is what the paper approach. It

creates the real environment for one-to-many relations

where it is just one workplace and the sender will be

waiting for a customized answer for each one depending

on his query.

The paper will address in details the issue of one-to-

many relationship where one represent a workplace like

an organization or a government office or any kind of

business, and many are the different email senders that

interact with the workplace. The paper highlight the

importance of creating specific email handlers that deal

with this category.

Currently, there are many studies for classifying email

[4]. An outsider observer can classify the email hander

into two modes. The emailers can select the mode that he

is interested in when installing the software. The creation

of the one-to-many mode will make the delivery of email

from one workplace to many consume less time of the

workplace employees since the customization of

responses will be less time consuming.

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The organization of this paper will be as follows.

Section 2 will describe the email relationships. Section 3

will suggest the methodology. Section 4 is the obtained

results. Section 5 is a discussion. The last section will be a

conclusion.

2. Email Relationships

We can classify the relations between emailers as one-

to-one denoted by 1-1, one-to-many denoted by 1-M,

many-to-one denoted by M-1, and many-to-many denoted

by M-M. A brief description of each one is listed below

from the sender point of view

• 1-1: A sender sends to one specific address. The

process of it will be easy mostly since it is just one

individual case.

• 1-M: Here we should consider who the sender is.

If the sender is a person, then this relationship will be

turned into 1-1 mostly as we discuses before.

Alternatively, if the sender is a workplace, the there are

two cases:

o Send a bulky email not a response to any

inquires and this case it will be turned into 1-1 since the

sender will mostly send just one email or use some mass

email program which sends the same message.

o Send email in response to hundreds of

personalized messages that they receive daily. This is a

case of real 1-M relationship where each response

requires specific information about the sender case and

this is case that the paper tackles.

• M-1: If the receive is a specific individual then

there is no problem since most emails that he received are

upon his request. However, if the receiver is a workplace,

then the sender will switch to a sender view and it this

case a huge load will be upon the shoulder of the

employees. The problem will be in responding to all these

email. Thus, this case will be turned to 1-to-m when the

workplace started in responding to them. The many

emails will be handled by different employees.

• M-to-M: This is mixture of 2 already discussed

cases. They are 1-M and M-1 relationship.

The author suggests that any email handler should give

the sender the option between 1-to-1 mode and 1-to-M

mode. The 1-to-1 mode is already exists and therefore it is

not of interest of this paper. On the other hand, the 1-M

mode is the focus of this paper.

3. Suggested Methodology

The reader of the received emails to a specific

workplace gets the first impression that the email message

he received is a special case and very individual. This is

true, within a short period of time, but if we observe the

emails over a long period of time, we can discover some

similarities and certain rhythms [6], adding to this a fact

that the reader of the emails are employees who turn over

time to change their job or take a vacation make us

assume that within a specific period of time there are

many readers and this sound that it increase the

personality of the received email although it is not true.

The author would suggest that the program that

handles these emails in workplace to consider the 1-to-M

relationship. First it should allow the reader to divide the

received emails into groups and mark each category with

a certain color. The number of categories and their names

must be selected by the workplace during the setup of the

program email. For example, we can classify the

responses of received email messages as follows:

- Waiting, missing item, request action from the

emailer, and no further action.

Each one of the previous categories will be marked

with a special color and thus the treatment of the email

will be divided into 4 categories which have almost the

same query without the personal information. In this case,

a template email answer will be used to respond to the

email. This template case uses the database and fills the

missing information like scripting language.

Please note that the response for each category has

been turned like sending almost one message to all people

listed in the address book ( current program) or the people

listed in the that category in the suggested approach. This

will make a specialization so that a specific employee

handle specific category and this will reduce the cost of

responding and unify the answers [4].

It should be noted that the number of categories can be

increased or decreased upon the necessity of the

workplace. For example, the employee can split a certain

category into two categories or merge two of them into

one.

The process of sending email in a certain category will

be turned into sending it to all recipients in one shot. For

example, suppose that there is a category marked “wait

one more week” then one email answer will use the

template and pull the data from the database and will send

email to all of emailers customized with the name and

other personal details.

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4. Experiments

The author conducted a study with an agency called

Digital Information Research Foundation (DIRF) which is

located in India (www.dirf.org). This organization

organizes a lot of international conferences all over the

year. The experiment was conduced on a specific period

during year 2007 and year 2008 for a specific conference

called The First IEEE International Conference on the

Applications of Digital Information and Web

Technologies (ICADIWT2008). The conference held in

Czech Republic during the period of Aug. 4-6, 2008. It

attracted more than 200 papers. The number of accepted

papers where 109 papers with an acceptance rate of 41%.

Although the conference seems that it has one type of

emails, but in reality it contain many different types. The

reason for this is that the authors are coming from many

different cultures and many different countries where

each one make his own request.

The email of the conference received a total number of

emails equal to 3890 email during the period of 8 months

distributed as can be seen in table (1). It was very time

consuming to respond to each one alone. Therefore, a

program was written to handle this.

Table 1. Categories of emails and their distributions

Type of Request Percentage

Response for a copyright form 14%

Apologize for Attendance 2%

Travel Information 12%

Request for a fax to the embassy 4%

Request to change the time of presentation 6%

Request for fee reduction 6%

Accommodation Information 12%

Request for receipt 4%

Question about indexing 2%

Request to attend with another person like

a wife

2%

Apologize for attendance 2%

Others 34%

In the previous table, when we say that a certain

percentage is 4% then this means that emails, then this

means that 4/100 * 3890 sent the same message.

5. Discussion

It is very difficult to measure the performance of the

suggested approach. Therefore, we will list some

examples of received emails for the first category. An

example of the case "Apologize for Attendance" is listed

in the following figure.

Following is some samples of received emails from

three different researchers

The author has managed many international conferences

where he received thousands of email. At the beginning

the responses was one by one. However, in the mentioned

conference, a program was developed to do automatic

response and to group emails. The time saving was very

clear. However, more capabilities to this program can be

added.

Existing program on the web are many. The closest one is

Open conference software which is open source code.

However, this program suffers from one major difficulty

that it has only 3 groups and they can not be increased or

decreased.

We should notice that sending 1-M relationship has a

disadvantage in that it removes the privacy if the user

sends using to or cc instead of bcc. The eliminated the

privacy increases the spam email and makes email servers

handle more spam email.

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Currently, some commercial program can implement the

suggested relationships. This includes mass emailer, email

spires, email collectors, and many others. One the other

side, the suggested prototype can take some benefits from

them by removing the redundancy in the emails.

The importance of the email can be affected by many

issues. In the case of the conference, it is always affected

by the deadline and the registration fees. It should be

noted that the receiver of the email will be a sender in

case he responded.

6. Conclusions Implementing the relationships in email will definitely

save the time and cost of the workplace and it reduced the

cost. This paper suggests to mark all similar emails into

one category so as to treat them in one group.

7. References

[1] Laura Dabbish, Robert Kraut, Susan Fussell, and Sara

Kiesler, “Understanding Email Use: Predicting Action on

a Message”, Proceedings of ACM conference on Human

factor in Computing Systems(CHI)m Portland, Orgen,

2005, pp. 691-700.

[2] Richard Segal and Jeffrey Kephart, “Mailcat: An

intelligent Assistant for Organizing E-mail”, Proceedings

of the third International Conference on the Autonomous

Agents, pp. 276-282 1999.

[3] Vel, O., Anderson, A., Corney, M. and Mohay, G.,

“Mailing E-Mail content for Author Identification

Forensics,” ACM SIGMOD Record, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp.

55-64, 2001.

[4] Mara, J., and Hidalgo, G. "Evaluating Cost-Sensitive

Unsolicited Bulk Email Categorization," In: Proceedings

of the 2002 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing,

Springer-Verlag, pp. 615—620, 2002.

[5] Ducheneaut, N., & Belloti, V. Email as Hhabitat: An

Exploration of Embedded Personal Information

Management. Interactions Vol. 8, No. 5, pp. 30-38, 2001.

[6] Tyler, J. R. & Tang, J. C. (2003). "When Can I Expect

an Email Response? A Study of Rhythms in Email

Usage," Proceedings from ECSCW ‘03: European

Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work,

pp. 239-258, 2003.

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