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Emailaholics Reveal Their Habits

Posted by CmdrTaco on Mon May 11, 2009 09:12 AM
from the wonder-which-group-i'm-in dept.
Communications Science
KentuckyFC writes "People can be accurately classified according to their email habits, say scientists from Yahoo Research in NYC, who have been studying the way 125,000 people use email on university campuses in the US and Europe. The team found that people fall into two clearly distinct types of emailer. The first group, 'day labororers,' tend to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. On the other hand, 'emailaholics' tend to send emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100. These groups are pretty stable: roughly 75% of users stay in the same group over a two-year period. That gives a pretty good way of classifying individuals that could be used by demographers. Interestingly, the technique can also be used to spot spambots which do not fit into either group."
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Submission: Emailaholics Reveal Their Habit In Online Study by KentuckyFC (1144503)
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  • I Don't Know If I Buy This (Score:3, Interesting)

    by pleappleappleap (1182301) on Monday May 11 2009, @09:18AM (#27906143) Homepage

    My email habits change very frequently. Where do I fit in?

  • Overly simplistic criteria (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mwvdlee (775178) on Monday May 11 2009, @09:18AM (#27906161) Homepage

    So basically anybody that uses e-mail outside of working hours is an "emailholic"? Doesn't that include pretty much every person who has a computer at home?

    • Re:Overly simplistic criteria (Score:5, Interesting)

      by wjh31 (1372867) on Monday May 11 2009, @09:24AM (#27906257) Homepage
      if you look at the graph in TFA, there appears to be a third small cluster in the region of the 'A' marker, which is people who start emailing early evening, and finish late at night, which i guess is those who use their e-mail accounts at home after work

      there is not much info about the email accounts montiored. Im guessing the day labourors are those who use their account just for work, with a sperate for personal stuff, and the emailaholics are those with one universal address. The subgroup i pointed out could then represent the personal accounts for the day labourors

    • So basically anybody that uses e-mail outside of working hours is an "emailholic"? Doesn't that include pretty much every person who has a computer at home?

      Well, from the PDF linked on arxiv [arxiv.org]:

      The cascading non-homogeneous Poisson process we present is motivated by two key observations: first, individuals send e-mail during "sessions" of relatively high activity that are separated by periods of inactivity during which no emails are sent; and second, the likelihood of commencing an active session is modulated by daily and weekly cycles. For convenience, we define the start and end of a session by the first and last e-mails sent in that session respectively. We define an individual as "active" if they are in an e-mail session, where the time between consecutive e-mails within each session is modeled as a homogeneous Poisson process with intra-session rate p_a. Correspondingly, we define an individual as "passive" if they are between e-mail sessions, where the time between sessions is modeled as a non-homogeneous Poisson process with inter-session rate p(t), which explicitly accounts for daily and weekly cycles of activity.

      The paper seems to identify when you're in a session and when you're not and also extrapolates these cycles not only to days but also to times of the week.

      While it's not very useful, it my be interesting to behaviorists or some field I know nothing about. It's always dangerous to grab a graph from a paper with no explanation at all of what it is showing.

      • So basically anybody that uses e-mail outside of working hours is an "emailholic"? Doesn't that include pretty much every person who has a computer at home?

        The paper seems to identify when you're in a session and when you're not and also extrapolates these cycles not only to days but also to times of the week.

        So anyone who has an e-mail capable smartphone and therefore doesn't engage in "sessions" is an "emailholic"?

    • No. I have a computer at home and I almost never send emails when I am at home (except in emergency situations).

    • Good god no. Why would I want to email during my free time?

  • Xaholics (Score:4, Funny)

    by PhilHibbs (4537) <snarks@gmail.com> on Monday May 11 2009, @09:19AM (#27906175) Homepage Journal

    Is the "aholic" suffix really any worse than "-gate" for any scandal?

    • Re:Xaholics (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 11 2009, @09:22AM (#27906233)

      Thank you for bringing our attention to this Aholicgate scandal, you Gateaholic.

      • Thank you for bringing our attention to this Aholicgate scandal, you Gateaholic.

        Dude, you do have problems - using aholic as a prefix and a suffix.

    • Is the "aholic" suffix really any worse than "-gate" for any scandal?

      You sound like another email abuser who is in denial about your habit. You are in stage 3 of your addiction (Ref. Addictions Anonymous, 12: The Stages of Addiction and Recovery [thecheers.org]).

      • My habit is not checking my email often enough. I tend to miss important messages like "today's class moved to room 3207".

        • I need to find a 9" wireless touch screen that will link to my computer. Just mount the touch screen in the can and life will be golden.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by TinBromide (921574)
      I guess that being an alcoholic is a step down from being a drug addict. I posit that an Addict is a term applied to someone who abuses something in a fashion that could get them sent to jail. I.E Sex Addicts and prostitutes, Drug addicts and controlled substances. While some college towns will have you believe that being drunk is a crime, getting sloshed is not provided you don't then do anything stupid (beat people, get into fights, drive, etc).

      Since you can't get sent to jail for sending normal email,

    • Is the "aholic" suffix really any worse

      It's a grammargate!

      But then again, I'm a lexivorous linguaholic...

    • Yeah, let's not get aholicaholic now.

      • Is the "aholic" suffix really any worse than "-gate" for any scandal?

        Yes. I propose declaring a war on it.

        Agreed. I'll get the President to appoint a Czar immediately.

  • When I was a student we still corresponded with one another using paper and ink. There was none of this fancy computerized email. It was all email by hand back then, and if you were lucky, maybe your parents would foot the bill for a quill.

    But the key here is not the manner in which we wrote each other. Rather, it is simply that living in the isolated world of "university life", we had totally different writing habits than those who lived in the "real world".

    Take, for instance, the frequency of our letters. While I could average a good 4 or 5 letters per evening, it was because my workload was such that it permitted much more free time than the work-a-day man could ever hope to enjoy. Between classes and quaffing pints of ale, we still had plenty of time to enjoy each others' companionship, even if only through the quill.

    Now, with real work and real timelines to meet, I find that I have very little extra time to sit down to write a letter out by hand.

    • I don't know if its just a bad description but you are correct. "People" does not describe the control group. It is ambiguous at best, so we have no idea if our habits fall into this study.

      • I was a full time college student for 14 years (and no degree. Darn my medium term attention deficit disorder!) but find that my worditoudinous output has increased, now that I have a boring job but decent computer setups. Not doing so much email, though I do manage 20 or so messages a day. Most of my output is on forum and blog sites. Would be interesting to record how many words/day I'm spewing upon a helpless world.

  • I am a spambot (Score:3, Funny)

    by unlametheweak (1102159) on Monday May 11 2009, @09:19AM (#27906185)

    The first group, "day labororers", tend to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800... "emailaholics" tend to send emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100....the technique can also be used to spot spambots which do not fit into either group

    That means that I am a spam bot. I've always hated being labeled.

  • My 'habit' (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Conspiracy_Of_Doves (236787) on Monday May 11 2009, @09:31AM (#27906387)

    I sometimes find myself logging into my email purely as a reflex action. Typing 'ma' in the url bar then down arrow once to highlight mail.yahoo.com, and typing my username and password in before I even realize that I'm doing it.

    I wish there was a yahoo email monitor that worked through the system tray. There's a widget, but it sits on the desktop and I hate having things permanently sitting in front of my other windows.

  • I recognize those two clusters, but there is a another big cluster in my own social network: People who only check their e-mail once a day (or less).

    I myself cannot comprehend such behavior.

  • If you don't restrict your e-mailing to regular work hours, you're an "emailaholic"? What a steaming pile of crap!

    I answer e-mail when I get around to it, and that's often outside of regular work hours (unless it's from the boss and requires an immediate response, of course). If I was somehow addicted to e-mail, the 353 unread, non-spam messages currently awaiting my attention would be getting dealt with right now. Yet here I am, futzing around on Slashdot when I should have my nose firmly against the

    • If you don't restrict your e-mailing to regular work hours, you're an "emailaholic"?

      Indeed, and having a smartphone changes one's habits too. I may not look at it for hours if I have something interesting going on, but if I am just lounging around I may respond the moment I hear my iPhone ding. I'm not constantly looking it, but my mail is always within reach. Some might classify that as addiction, but I just see it as a matter of convenience and extending people the courtesy of responding quickly if I am free when their message comes in.

  • Snail mail is much easier to track. All of my mail spam arrives in the middle of the day, so every evening, I just throw away what's in the mailbox.

  • Next up... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Wolfger (96957) <wolfger&gmail,com> on Monday May 11 2009, @10:13AM (#27907241) Homepage
    Cellphoneholics! People who use their cellphone when they're awake, and NOT JUST DURING BUSINESS HOURS! My gods, they're obviously addicted to cell phones.
  • Another case of "if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".
  • ...disappointing content. Am I missing a link somewhere? Is there something of substance in that story anywhere?

  • I hate it when science stories - in any media or site, not just /. - don't like to the original paper. There's really no excuse when the paper is freely available [arxiv.org], either.

  • They excluded people that use email almost entirely for receiving automated notifications. Replies to a Slashdot post (cue the dozen posts intended to just trigger the notification...), forum thread, calendar events, Word of the Day...

    Pretty much the only emails I send are FailBlog pictures to a sibling every few weeks.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by tepples (727027)
      You're looking at the cluster where start time is nearly equal to end time. Those might be people who check their mail only once a day.

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