Slashdot Mirror
Emailaholics Reveal Their Habits
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."
My email habits change very frequently. Where do I fit in?
That's really intersting.
I'm not sure how it would be used to prevent spam though, unless it is used on the system sending the spam.
After all, how do you know a) which group a person fits in, and b) what time it is where they are?
Also, what do you do about people who work night shifts, and thus don't fit into one of the patterns?
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?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Is the "aholic" suffix really any worse than "-gate" for any scandal?
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.
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.
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:
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
Technoli
e.g., 0900 to 1800 instead of "nine AM to six PM".
Hmm, maybe that's evidence of a video game/military strategy game addiction, which doesn't have much in common with sending lots of email.
There's an interesting straight-line cluster in the upper left quadrant, with exactly 45-degree slope. Is that the spambot cluster?
What about those types?
Well, what does ist really reveal? People over 40 are more likely to still use snail mail instead of email for private communication and only use e-mail during work? Not that interesting... please move along....
I can't help sending millions of people email about the virtues of \/1a6ra.
I'm a emailaholic and need protection by the Americans With Disabilities Act.
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.
HCG 50a = 2MASX J11170638+5455016
11h17m06.4s +54d55m02s
Is the "aholic" suffix really any worse
It's a grammargate!
But then again, I'm a lexivorous linguaholic...
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 grindstone.
I guess what I'm trying to say in my semi-literate way, is, "I got yer spambot right here, analyst boy.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
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.
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.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
There are some people who are addicted to sobriety. They can't seem to be able to live a normal life without being sobre, and can't imagine another way of living. Adolf Hitler was one of those people who suffered from compulsive sobriety. Sobriety is one of the hidden mental illnesses, and AFAIK is not even recognized as a mental illness by the World Health Organization et al.
What about other stats regarding email use. Here within my office I respond to numerous email issues and observe the different ways people treat email, some users have over 1000 unread emails in their Inbox, blatantly ignoring spam and daily announcements. They ignore them and allow them to be archived creating digital waste on the file server. I myself check emails as they come in, deleting those I know do not pertain to business functions (which are required to be retained). I also know users that will open an email item and leave it open until they can respond, putting them in a difficult situation should they experience a power failure. What does everyone else see in the workplace?
But there's another beneft from the technique. Humans have a unique pattern of transmission that makes them easy to tell apart from machines that send spam. So the new method could be used to spot spambots too.
What is to stop spambot operators from duplicating or at least attempting to mask their email spam patterns to seem like those of humans?
Am I missing something? What is this unique pattern? Is it that humans only send emails at certain times during the day?
What is the proposed anti-spam filter? Is it a time of day filter?
They found two distinct types of emailer. They termed the first "day labourers" because they tended to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. The second group they called "emailaholics" because these people sent emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.
So there are only two extremes? This study is awful.
- - -
Spam email accounts for anywhere from 81% to 97% of all emails sent per year depending on what statistics your are using.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7988579.stm
http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2008/07/dirtydozjul08.html
http://www.govtech.com/gt/259865?topic=117671
I'm 53 years old and I prefer e-mail to any other form of correspondence. I don't like talking on the phone, I can't wait for snail mail and texting is a waste of time and money. Anyone who needs to contact me knows exactly how to do so. :) Pretty simple.
Another case of "if you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
...disappointing content. Am I missing a link somewhere? Is there something of substance in that story anywhere?
The first group, "day labororers",
AKA "people with healthy lifestyles"
tend to send emails throughout the normal working day between 0900 and 1800 but not at other times. On the other hand, "emailaholics"
AKA the disabled and the "couch potatoes"
tend to send emails throughout the waking hours from 0900 to 0100.
Fight Morbid Obesity
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, either.
Nick
I know that many people can get addicted to Chocolahol, but I wasn't aware of there being a substance called Emailahol.
Aside from that, there a many harder substances, such as Twitterhol, and Textahol. Perhaps, Emailahol is a gateway addiction to worse habbits?
On that note, stop adding "aholic" as a suffix to things to describe addiction. We don't call nicotine addicts, Nicoholics! Nor, do we call heroin addicts, heroinaholics.
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.
...except with booze instead of email.
(apologies to The Onion)
Since I rarely use email 9-5 (internal IM and other tech has mostly replaced it for work) I usually only look at my personal email a couple times each evening, usually when I'm home from work, and shortly before I go to bed.
Since I don't fall into either of their groups, I'd be considered a spam-bot. Which I guess wouldn't be a target market for other spam, so maybe that isn't such a bad thing.