E-mail overload has predictable results.

• Position: E-MAIL - Brief article

Knowledge workers today are dealing with e-mail overload, a perception that they send, receive, and process more e-mails than they can handle, find, or process on a daily basis. Interestingly, on average, those who receive 100 or more e-mails each day can respond to only about 5% of them, according to a report on a recent study of 2 million users exchanging 16 billion e-mails over several months, "Evolution of Conversations in the Age of Email Overload."

In short, the researchers found that "as users receive more email messages in a day, they reply to a smaller fraction of them, using shorter replies," and they often reply faster.

Some of the key findings of the research, as summarized in a blog post by the Information Governance Initiative (IGI), were:

* People generally reply quickly to e-mails, most often within an hour of receiving a message.

* Younger users reply faster to messages than their older peers, and they send...