Ducheneaut, N. and Watts, L. A. (2005) in Search of Coherence: a Review of E-mail Research. Human-computer Interaction, 20 (1-2). Pp. 11-48. Issn 0737-0024 Opus: University of Bath Online Publication Store in Search of Coherence: a Review of Email Research

This version is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. He is interested in ethnography, computer-supported cooperative work, computer-mediated communication, and the sociology of online communities. Leon Watts is an applied psychologist concerned with human communication and mediating technologies; he is a lecturer in theABSTRACT Email research encompasses a vast and diverse body of work that accumulated over the past 30 years. In this paper, we take a critical look at the research literature and ask two simple questions: What is email research? Can it help us reinvent email? Rather than defining an overarching framework, we survey the literature and identify three metaphors that have guided email research up to this day: email as a file cabinet extending human information processing capabilities, email as a production line and locus of work coordination, and finally email as a communication genre supporting social and organizational processes. We propose this taxonomy so that designers of future email systems can forge their own direction of research, with knowledge of other directions that have been explored in the past. As an illustration of the possible future work we want to encourage with this review, we conclude with a description of several guidelines for the reinvention of email inspired by our journey through the literature.