Managing personal and work email in the same box: overcoming the tensions through new metaphors

We are all familiar with the seemingly endless task of sorting through emails to keep on top of received messages; ploughing through list and folder based file structures to find saved emails and file attachments. It can be an ongoing headache. In this paper we describe our approach to helping people manage their personal emails and their accompanying attachments using novel interface metaphors. An initial online survey was conducted on people’s email storage behaviour for both home and work contacts. The findings suggest there is a tension between how people currently manage the two and how they would like to do this. Following this we explore new ways of conceptualising storage and retrieval in terms of personcentric storage systems.