The Social Network and Relationship Finder: Social Sorting for Email Triage.

Abstract

Email triage is the process of going through unhandled email and deciding what to do with it. This process can quickly become a serious problem for users with large volumes of email. Studies have found that people use a variety of approaches to triage their email, many of which have a social component. We believe that email clients can better support email triage by providing users with additional sorting features based on socially salient information. We present a prototype email client, SNARF (the Social Network and Relationship Finder), that aggregates social meta-data about email correspondents to aid email triage. Users can then sort their correspondents based on this meta-data bringing emails from socially important people to the foreground. 1