PIM paper: Grevet et. al. “Overload is overloaded: email in the age of Gmail”

A CHI 2014 paper by C Grevet, D Choi, D Kumar, E Gilber.

Abstract: 

"The term email overload has two definitions: receiving a large volume of
incoming email, and having emails of different status types (to do, to
read, etc). Whittaker and Sidner proposed the latter definition in 1996,
noticing that email inboxes were far more complex than simply
containing incoming messages. Sixteen years after Whittaker and Sidner,
we replicate and extend their work with a qualitative analysis of
Google’s Gmail. We find that email overload, both in terms of volume and
of status, is still a problem today. Our contributions are 1) updating
the state of email overload, 2) extending our understanding of overload
in the context of Gmail and 3) comparing personal with work email
accounts: while work email tends to be status overloaded, personal email
is also type overloaded. These comparisons between work and personal
email suggest new avenues for email research."