One Way to Reduce Email Stress




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4 PROFESSIONAL ENGLISH

One Way to Reduce Email Stress 
 
We all feel it — that panicked sensation when we check our inbox and see the deluge of emails 
awaiting our attention. The average person receives upwards of 150 emails a day, and it often seems 
like no amount of tagging or filtering can close the floodgates. 
One major source of stress is the never-ending conversation threads made possible by group emails. 
Believe it or not, such tools have barely changed since the pre-Internet days of Arpanet 40 years 
ago: You either opt in or opt out, you get dozens of irrelevant emails, and the views of a few 
loudmouths usually end up drowning out the rest. 
In an age of Facebook and Reddit, users expect a sense of control over how they consume their 
content, and yet that control and personalization often doesn’t extend to their own inboxes. Now, 
CSAIL researchers are trying to change that with a new prototype system called Murmur that aims 
to improve the mailing-list experience by incorporating popular social-media features like upvoting, 
following, and blocking. 
CSAIL PhD student Amy Zhang, lead author on a new paper she presented this week at the ACM 
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Seoul, says she’d always been struck by 
the fact that people use mailing lists for such a variety of reasons - a sentiment that was echoed by 
her team’s surveys of more than 400 individuals from 30 different academic, social and 
geographical mailing lists. The answer, Zhang says, is to create an experience that’s as 
customizable as the ones we have on social media. For example, a sizable portion of respondents 
said they wanted to have more meaningful conversations on list-relevant topics — but were deterred 
from initiating because of the perception that they were “spamming” people. 
With Murmur, which is still in active development, tentative senders will be able to post a message 
to a specific subset of friends on the list who could give it the equivalent of a Facebook “like” or a 
Reddit “upvote”, such that it automatically spreads to more list recipients. You can also explicitly 
exclude certain people from emails you send, which could come in handy for office surprise parties 
or happy hours. 
One of the core goals of the project is to make mailing lists - and email more generally - a better 
experience for people who want to have more substantial discussions. 
As far as receiving messages, many respondents expressed a feeling of “interruption fatigue” and 
wished they could choose how much content they receive. Murmur addresses this by letting you 
“follow” or “mute” particular users, threads and topics, and even providing the option of specifying 
how many emails with certain tags that you receive in a given day or week. 
Our emails have long been a topic of concern for providers. Google’s new Inbox, for example, tries 
to help by using machine-learning techniques to bundle our messages into “important” and 
“unimportant” folders. But Karger objects to what he describes as “paternalistic approaches” to 
organizing our emails. 

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The earliest listservs, based on the first email program SNDMSG, were geared towards particular 
interests like programming and science fiction. In comparison to systems like message boards, 
people were drawn towards listservs’ ease of use and simplicity in being able to send one email to 
communicate to a large group of people. But as more customizable social media platforms have 
come to dominate our lives, Zhang says that the medium’s one-size-fits-all mentality has become 
outdated and suboptimal. 
“In an age where we can actively decide what communications are worth paying attention to, it’s 
remarkable that mailing lists have continued to maintain such a binary approach,” Zhang says. 
“You’re either guaranteed to get everything, or you get nothing at all. Something like Murmur 
might not be a perfect solution, but at the very least it gives users a greater sense of ownership over 
their communications.” 
See more at: 
http://newsoffice.mit.edu
 

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