ClearContext Corporate Blog

“I’m drowning in email.”
                    – ClearContext 2005 Email Usage Survey Repondent

Email is taking over many people’s business lives and there is no simple solution to the problem.  Results from the ClearContext 2005 Email Usage Survey show that the volume of email individuals are facing on a daily basis, particularly the level of business email they deal with, is staggering – and the impact on productivity is profound.  The sheer number of messages that people constantly receive requires them to use a variety of tools and techniques to make email a productivity tool rather than a productivity drain.  “It’s a chore to have to manually manage the tool I use to help me manage my productivity.”

The data used in this report comes from a survey of 300 people.  About a quarter of these people were technologists, while the rest were evenly spread across a variety of industries and careers.  There was greater uniformity when it came to technologies in use – the large majority of respondents were Windows XP and Outlook 2003 users.

Most respondents have between 2 to 6 email accounts.  Some use over 10 email accounts.  The majority of these people use POP and Webmail accounts for personal email, while Exchange-based email is the type most commonly utilized for business email.  About half of the respondents receive from 50 to 250 emails daily.  Almost 15% of survey respondents get over 250 emails every day. 

Where are all of these emails coming from?  For the most part, the workplace.  60% of users report the majority of their email is work-related.  Spam also continues to fill up people’s inboxes – 30% of respondents report over half of their email is spam.  All of this email obviously takes a lot of time to deal with.  About half of our survey respondents spend over 2 hours daily in email – and 14% spend over 4 hours in email every day.  Especially noteworthy is the degree to which people’s work revolves around email: 60% of users check email multiple times per hour – and 40% of survey respondents describe themselves as checking email “constantly.”

80% of the survey respondents report major issues with email.  These users suffer from three major problems: spam, email organization, and simply too many email messages.  A third of the survey respondents describe themselves as feeling overwhelmed by email.  “I feel like if I spend enough time to keep on top of my e-mail,
I don’t have enough time to focus on the things the e-mail messages
initiate!”

So how can users make email work?  What are the specific problems with the way email is used in the business world today, and what tools and techniques are people using to make email work for them as opposed to drain their productivity?  What are ways email usage could be improved for everyone?  There is no “silver bullet” to solve the challenges of email, but our survey respondents had many great suggestions that they use to help make email really work for them.

Spam remains the biggest problem for email users and a majority of users have installed anti-spam software.  “One of my personal accounts that I don’t want to give up receives 65+ spam per hour.”  Even with these tools in use, people continue to receive large volumes of spam.  Beyond using anti-spam tools, it is critical that people protect their email addresses and utilize secondary email addresses anytime they need to give out their email address outside their contact network or make contact information available in a public forum. 

Keeping email organized is the second biggest problem people face.   “My inbox is a disaster and I feel I need a better way to organize it.”  Almost all users utilize folders to file their messages, but many end up with far too many folders to easily manage.   About half the respondents have over 25 folders; a quarter of the respondents have between 50 and 500 email folders.  Most users have over 10,000 messages stored in their folders – some over 100,000.  Two-thirds of users utilize an external search tool such as Lookout or Google Desktop Search to help them find emails.

Simply receiving too many messages is the third major problem.  In addition to all of the important email communications throughout the day, this problem is exacerbated by a habit many people have – “I’m bcc’d on too many things by people that I can’t get to stop doing that.” Another user states the problem more directly:  “Email is the most misused and abused form of communication in the workplace.”  Newsletters and mailing lists also account for a significant portion of excess email – however, these emails are easier to manage using automated filing rules.

This flood of emails every day results in too many emails piling up in people’s inboxes.   Only a quarter of users keep their inboxes near empty with 10 or fewer messages.  On the other side of the spectrum, about a quarter of respondents keep over 200 messages in their inbox, with 10% of users keeping over 1000 messages in their inbox.  Why?  “Too many messages to deal with in a day and then end up not deleting them so they build up.”  50% of survey respondents use followup and priority flags in their inbox to help them mark which emails are important.  Many others use rules or add-in tools “mostly for sorting mail sent to various aliases at work” or to “send mail to various folders based on who from or what mailing list.”

How individuals interact with the incoming emails is also a major factor when it comes to email productivity.  Constantly checking email is a major problem for many users.  It is “too easy to be distracted by the constant inbound flow of messages.”  Productivity methodologies such as Getting Things Done help people focus on identifying and creating actionable tasks from email rather than letting email pile up and spending multiple passes re-reading the same emails.  Tools such as ClearContext Inbox Manager help “triage” the email by identifying high priority email and automatically categorizing emails into topics. 

“The fact is that email is the conduit for virtually all business work product in the 21st century.  Learning to manage it appropriately becomes everyone’s personal responsibility.”

It is critical that people adopt some of these tools and techniques to make email an effective business communication tool.  The volume of email exchanged nowadays is such that many users just give up.  “I never manage to catch-up and there is always a substantial number of emails that will not be processed.  I rely upon the fact that important and urgent matters will reappear.” That type of response defeats the very purpose of email – quick, efficient communication. 

It is clear from our survey that email is a critical element of people’s work lives, but it is fundamentally broken for many users who end up spending more time managing and reacting to email than using it to help them achieve their goals.  While many people use various tools and techniques to cope with the flood of email, it is clear that most are doing just enough to stay afloat.  Our advice: get yourself an email management strategy.  If you don’t have a plan for dealing with email you are not being fair to your customers, your co-workers, or yourself.    Below you will find links to some ideas and articles that we think will help you find the method that works best for your particular environment.  By utilizing these resources, individuals can effectively respond to and organize large volumes of email and truly make email work for them.

The Tyranny of Email (Ole Eichhorn)
If Your Inbox Has More Than a Screenful of Messages In It, You’re Rude (Jason Clarke)
In Praise of Full Inboxes (Slacker Manager)
ClearContext to deal with E-mail (Omar Shahine)
My equation for serious productivity – 2005 (Marc Orchant)
If you use Outlook, you need Lookout (Ed Bott)
How do you manage your mail? (KC Lemson)
Top Five Ways to Manage the Inbox Effectively (ClearContext)
Top Five Ways to Reduce Email Traffic (ClearContext)
Carbon Copy Bloat (ClearContext)

We have posted graphs of survey results here, here, and here.

By default, ClearContext Inbox Manager installs three views in Microsoft Outlook: Prioritized, Prioritized By Day, and Prioritized By Week.  All three views behave basically the same way; they present the inbox organized and color coded by message priority with the most important email appearing at the top of the inbox in red or blue and junk mail appearing at the bottom in grey.  These default views allow the user to take advantage of Inbox Manager’s full complement of prioritization and organization functionality.

We realize that these views don’t work for all users.  Part of the advantage of using Outlook as a platform is that all user interface settings, including the way messages are presented, are highly customizable.  You can change the priority colors ClearContext assigns in the Inbox, enhance the views to take advantage of native Outlook grouping, use a view that presents messages in date order but continues to color-code, or show only unread, prioritized messages.  Users can make these modifications on their own or download sample views from our Downloadable Views page.

The latest view that we have created looks nearly identical to the default Outlook Messages view and is intended for those who wish to utilize ClearContext topic assignment and filing buttons but do not require inbox prioritization and color-coding.  Messages are presented in the inbox in black and ordered by Received By date.  We have added the ClearContext Topic field to the view, where the user can see topics assigned to the message thread.  The view can be downloaded here.

Post 3 in our 2005 Email Usage Survey Series. (Post 2: What Are All These Emails We’re Getting?)

In our last post, we discussed the type and volume of email people are receiving.  Users are adopting a variety of measures to efficiently deal with this email volume and the ever-increasing amount of knowledge that ends up locked in email datastores.  In this post we’ll discuss some of the tools being used to help manage all this information.

Given the large number of users who mentioned spam as a problem (almost half of the respondents receive 25% or more spam email), we were a little surprised to see that only about 60% of respondents have installed anti-spam software.  We had expected this number to be higher, especially among our fairly tech-savvy respondent group.  We imagine there may be a number of users who do not use a client-side anti-spam product, but work at a company that has server-side anti-spam tools installed.  As for the anti-spam tools themselves, no product emerged as a clear favorite.  Cloudmark, MailWasher, McAfee SpamKiller, Norton Anti-Spam, Postini, and SpamAssassin were among the more popular products.

Search functionality within native email clients is clearly lacking, as almost two-thirds of survey respondents use a search tool in conjunction with their email.  The two most popular by far were Lookout, an Outlook-specific search tool purchased by Microsoft last year, and Google’s desktop search; both used by 27% of those using search tools.  Copernic, MSN, Yahoo!, and X1 were other tools with over 5% share (13%, 9%, 8%, and 6% respectively).

When it comes to email tools, users are definitely focused primarily on optimizing their email management, rather than their communications with others.  Automated contact and address management tools/services were not very popular, used by only 12% of our respondents.  The most popular tool, used by two-thirds of that group, was Plaxo.

Over a third of respondents use other types of tools in conjunction with their email client.  The two most popular email add-ins were Newsgator (to manage RSS feeds in Outlook) and Netcentric’s GTD plug-in (an implementation of the Getting Things Done productivity methodology).  Other popular add-ins included ClearContext (email productivity, inbox management), Anagram (automated data entry), Onfolio (RSS, content management) and You Perform (email utilities).

We have posted graphs of these results here.

Users are clearly looking beyond the email client for solutions to help them manage their email and developers are definitely embracing Outlook as a platform.  In our full report next week we’ll discuss how users are taking advantage of these tools and a variety of techniques to help efficiently face the challenge of keeping up with email.

We are pleased to announce the formal release of ClearContext Inbox Manager v1.1.  We have updated all the requisite documentation on our main site, including our User Guide and Product Data Sheet, which can be found on the Additional Information page.  Thanks to those of you who downloaded and tried out v1.1 in early access.  There have been no changes to the code since that release.

At the suggestion of several users (see this forum post), v1.1 adds new fields that allow you to take advantage of native Outlook date grouping functionality.  To install these views, you can download them from our Downloadable Views page.  Alternatively, for those of you who have already customized your views and/or would rather make the changes yourself, here are step by step instructions to implement grouping:

1.  Select the ClearContext view you would like to change (i.e. By Day or By Week).
2.  Go to the Customize Current View dialog via the View menu item in Outlook (View > Arrange By > Current View > Customize Current View in Outlook 2003).
3.  Select the Group By… button.
4.  Uncheck "Automatically group according to arrangement" if it is checked.
5.  At the bottom of the window, change "Select available fields from:" to ClearContext.
6.  Set "Group Items by" to CC-DisplayDay or CC-DisplayWeek (for the By Day or By Week view, respectively).
7.  Select Ascending or Descending, depending on which order you would like dates to be displayed in.
8.  Click OK.

Once you have made these changes, save the view from the ClearContext Options menu (Tools > Options > ClearContext > Views > Save).

Please note that these views only work on v1.1 or better.  If you have recently upgraded from a previous version, you must force a re-score of all messages (via Tools > Options > ClearContext > Scoring and adjusting a slider) to utilize this functionality.

If you have questions about these views and/or additional suggestion for future releases, please see our Features & Support Forum.

Edited to include a screen print of the Group By Week view.

Post 2 in our 2005 Email Usage Survey Series. (Post 1: 2005 Email Usage Survey Overview)

Email overload is something we are all keenly aware of, so it was no surprise to see the numbers of emails people are dealing with on a daily basis.  About 50% of the 300 survey respondents receive between 50 to 250 messages per day.  Almost 15% of the respondents receive over 250 messages per day.  But what are all these emails we’re receiving?

One of the most startling facts was that spam continues to account for over 50% of the email received by over 30% of those surveyed.  Even with users, companies, and service providers adopting anti-spam measures, this clearly continues to be a very serious problem and a major time and resource sink.

For the majority (62%), it’s the workplace that is filling their inboxes with mail.  For 35% of users, work-related email accounts for over 75% of their email.  However, there is clearly a glut of unnecessary email being sent.  38% of users describe the majority of this email as non-critical.  And being cc’d on emails accounts for a significant (25% or more) portion of the email received by 30% of respondents.  In fact, 13% of email users report that over half the email they receive consists just of messages they are copied on! 

While many people have told us that the personal email they receive is very important to them, it constitutes a relatively small portion of the email volume people have to deal with – for 50% of respondents, less than 10% of their email is personal correspondence.  Only 17% of users have over 50% personal email.

The remainder of people’s inbox is filled up with newsletters and mailing lists.  These emails don’t usually account for a large portion of email people receive, and these are also the emails that people find to be some of the easiest to deal with using rules and other filing systems.

We have posted graphs of these results here.

We’ll finish up this series with another post this week on email tools people are using and next week we’ll publish a full report discussing our thoughts on the survey, the challenges people are facing with email, and techniques to help manage those challenges effectively.

Jason Clarke has written a thorough review of ClearContext Inbox Manager.  Ultimately he recommended us, but uninstalled the application.  Seems strange?  His reasoning is sound and shows that he put a lot of thought into the decision.  We greatly appreciate the time and effort that he put into looking at our product.

We suspect that, much like Jason, there are users out there who like the idea of ClearContext’s prioritization and topic management capabilities, but need to see their messages in received order like Outlook’s native Messages view.  To do so, we suggest modifying the ClearContext Prioritized View to sort by Received date.  ClearContext will continue to color code messages and topic assignment and filing functionality will remain intact, but the most recent messages will appear at the top of the inbox just as they did pre-ClearContext.

You can download this view from our views page or make the modifications yourself.  In the ClearContext Prioritized view simply click on the Received tab at the top of the Inbox.  If you are using the Outlook 2003 Side Reading Pane, move it to the bottom (View > Reading Pane > Bottom), click on the Received Tab, and then move the Reading Pane back to the side.  Save the view at Tools > Options > ClearContext > Views.  If, at any time, you would like to return to the factory installed view, select Restore Original on the ClearContext Options tab.

We have just started analyzing the responses from our Email Usage Survey.  The 300 respondents consisted of a pretty evenly divided split from each of the sponsor bloggers and ClearContext’s existing user base.  We’ll be posting our detailed analysis of the survey results in the coming weeks.

As a first step, we would like to share an overview of the technology people are using, the volume of email they receive, and the time they devote to dealing with email.  We have posted graphs of the results here.  Among the interesting facts we’d like to highlight:

• 33% of our tech-savvy respondents have Gmail accounts, edging out Hotmail and Yahoo!
• Having just one email address is quite uncommon; most have 2-6.
• Over 60% of the respondents get over 50 emails/ day.  15% receive more than 250!
• While spam remains the single biggest email problem, 40% of users are most challenged by email organization or overload issues.

In our next post we’ll delve into detail regarding the breakdown of different types of emails that contribute to the huge volumes of email that people face.  After that, we’ll discuss the strategies people are using to handle this email and the tools / technologies they are using to help them.

We have closed the ClearContext 2005 Email Usage Survey and are starting to tabulate the wealth of information we have received.  Thanks to everyone who took the time to complete the survey.  In particular, thanks to those who helped make the survey possible, including The Office Letter, OfficeZealot, email.about.com, The Office Weblog, Omar Shahine,  and Ed Bott.

We had over 300 responses, 260 of which gave their email address to receive a coupon towards the purchase of ClearContext Inbox Manager.  Congrats to the 26 recipients of free licenses: Jeff M., Michael M., E.L., Mark G., Mark I., SV, Scott S., Dwayne, G.P., Jim Y., D.S., Alan D., Perry, Steve N., Reagan, S.M., J.C., Doug, lk, MM, Vance, M.SGM, Jason, k, mj, and william.

Results of the survey will be posted shortly.

We’ve completed testing on ClearContext Inbox Manager v 1.1 and have posted the executable here.  The official public release will be in about two weeks after we’ve completed work on documentation, website updates, and a host of other release-related housekeeping duties.    In the meantime, we’d like to offer you the ability to download 1.1 in advance of the official announcement.  The changes in this release are described in our previous Product Plan Post.

If you have any questions regarding this release, feel free to ask us via email and/or post on our Features and Support Forum.

Buzz Bruggeman is writing an article on Outlook as a platform and looking for feedback. Take a look and let him know what you’re doing within Outlook and what you would like to see.  Omar Shahine and Marc Orchant are two of many who have written recently about the value of using additional tools within Outlook.  This is obviously a topic we’re very passionate about.

Outlook is for many the single application in which they spend the most time every single day .  It’s also increasingly becoming the place where people store their most important information.  It only makes sense that Outlook should become a platform for applications that deal with that information.  However, to really capitalize on this opportunity, the process of developing applications integrated into Outlook needs to become much smoother.  Browser developers acknowledged this in their world and created a plugin architecture designed to let developers easily extend a simple page viewing application into something much broader.  Hopefully as more and more software developers focus on building tools within Outlook and increased awareness is given to the concept of using Outlook as a platform, Microsoft will focus on making Outlook a more flexible, open, and stable platform on which to develop additional add-in applications.