Too Many E-Mails? SNARF Them Up!

By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research

Vacation’s over. You’ve had a grand time: intriguing locales, fun events, delicious food, memorable moments. You’re relaxed, your batteries recharged. Life is good.

You get home and fire up your laptop to see how things have been going at work while you were gone. That’s when you’re accosted by grim reality: hundreds upon hundreds of e-mails, each demanding your attention, your action, your time. How can you even begin to sort through this informational assault? Panic and dread set in. Vacation’s really over.

Unless you have SNARF, that is.

SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, developed by Microsoft Research and available for download, is designed to help computer users cope with precisely such scenarios. SNARF, a complement to e-mail programs such as Outlook, filters and sorts e-mail based on the type of message and the user’s history with an e-mail correspondent. The result: a collection of alternative views of your e-mail that can help you make sense of the deluge.

“SNARF grew out of an exploration of how people triage their e-mail and whether social information would help,” says A.J. Brush, a researcher within Microsoft Research’s Community Technologies Group who, along with then-intern Carman Neustaedter, devised the project in the summer of 2004. “We often say, ‘Your dog knows the difference between strangers and friends who visit your house; why shouldn’t your e-mail client?’”

The process on which SNARF is based is called social sorting. The concept has been around for a while; in fact, Microsoft Research’s Eric Horvitz worked on a similar project called Priorities a few years back. But what’s new about this implementation is its simplicity. The tool, which has been deployed within Microsoft for a field study, simply counts e-mails, sorts them by sender, and draws conclusions about their relative importance from the intensity of the correspondence relationship.

“Just by using e-mail,” Brush says, “we build up a huge amount of implicit information about whom our friends and colleagues are—who I send e-mail to and receive e-mail from—and SNARF can take advantage of this.”

When launched for the first time, SNARF indexes your e-mail. When indexing is complete, a window with three panes is displayed. The top pane includes a list of people who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed or cc’d to you. The middle pane includes people who have sent recent, unread e-mail addressed to anyone. And the bottom pane includes all people mentioned in any e-mail you have received in the past week.

A configuration panel enables you to change the types of messages displayed and to sort them in different ways. Once you have the tool configured as you prefer, you can double-click on a contact’s name within one of the panes, then view a list of all recent e-mail from that person. It works with mailing lists, too, and you can organize mail by threads and read the entire thread in chronological order, top to bottom.

“The coolest thing to me,’ Brush says, “is the power of collecting and presenting ‘simple information.’ I was surprised and pleased by how much power you can get from simply counting the e-mails you send to people and using that information to organize e-mail for users. Social information is very powerful.”

So, who would benefit from using SNARF?

“Everyone!” exclaims Danyel Fisher, another Community Technologies Group researcher. “Well, everyone who can answer ‘yes’ to questions like ‘Do you get too much e-mail?’ or ‘Do you find e-mail frustrating?’ or ‘Do you sometimes find it hard to keep up with your e-mail?’”

In other words, just about all of us.

“SNARF was developed for people who have trouble keeping up with their e-mail,” Brush says, “but we have found that people who travel often or spend lots of time in meetings may find SNARF particularly helpful. Our studies seem to suggest that SNARF can be useful to help people stay aware of new e-mail.”

The real proof of concept comes from the usage patterns of the people who know SNARF best: its originators.

“I have had some great SNARF moments,” says Marc Smith, a researcher on the project team, “in which a person is displayed high in the interface but was buried in my Inbox, pointing me to a high-value e-mail that was just what I wanted.”

Fisher says he uses SNARF for three distinct purposes:

• “Start-of-day triage: I glance at my SNARF box and start clicking through the new messages in my Unread Mail To/CC Me pane. Most of them, I try to read in Thread view in order to see how the messages are interrelated with each other. I’ll also check out the Unread Mail column periodically and glance at the top of my configured Mailing Lists pane to see if anything new showed up on the SNARF list.
• “Awareness: I’ll leave SNARF up on my second monitor. When a new message comes, SNARF tells me—and tells me who it’s from. I then decide to respond at the time or a bit later.
• “Mailing-list reading: The Thread view and the Mailing-list view fit nicely together. Once a week or so, I’ll skim over the mailing lists I care about and delete whole uninteresting threads at a time or skim over the ones I might be interested in.”

Brush, too, says she relies on the awareness feature of SNARF. Funny thing is, that usage took the researchers by surprise.

“It was surprising relative to the design,” Fisher says, “which was triage-centered. As SNARF became a part of each of our lives in our own ways, the awareness was something we discovered on our own computers, as well as on users’ computers.”

SNARF’s value at alerting users to new, important e-mail is helping the researchers further refine the tool.

“In the latest version,” Fisher says, “SNARF rolls up views to a one-line version when you double-click. Those views still summarize how many messages and people are visible. If I want to check out the other views, I can, but I can keep them hidden, too. We’re continuing to work on ways to make change visible but to hide unnecessary detail.”

The SNARF team—which also includes Andy Jacobs, Neustaedter, Smith, Paul Johns, and Tom Lento—encountered other surprises, as well.

“My favorite aspect of SNARF,” says Jacobs, lead developer for both the Priorities and SNARF projects, “is the Thread View to read my distribution lists. I’ve subscribed to many distribution lists and have found reading them all a chore. With SNARF, I can see all the threads for a particular list and then view all messages in any thread on the same screen—all at once and in chronological order. If I’m not interested, I simply delete the entire thread with one keystroke.”

SNARF has a multifaceted appeal, Brush observes.

“In general, I was pleasantly surprised that SNARF seems to have caught on with different people for different reasons. We have a set of people who use it for triage, we have a set of people who use it for awareness, and a set of people who use it for reading threads, primarily for keeping up with distribution lists.”

And the research had at least one unexpected finding: People who decide how to act on their e-mails the first time they open them are less frustrated with the overall e-mail experience than those who comb through their mail repeatedly.

“We found a really strong correlation between people who said they used a multi-pass strategy and people who said they were overwhelmed with e-mail,” Fisher recalls. “We weren’t expecting that; we figured that all mail strategies were created equal. This told us that it really matters how you read your mail. If you keep going back to it, over and over, you will get frustrated. If you find a way to hit it once and get it out of your way, you like it a lot more.”

With the current version of SNARF available for public download, people around the world will get an opportunity to try out the tool for themselves. The Community Technologies team hopes they like what they see.

“I’m really proud of the fact that we’ve identified a common problem that many people have and built a tool that seems to help them,” Brush says. “I find it extremely rewarding to build tools that make a difference in people’s everyday life. I’m most proud of the fact that SNARF is robust enough that people can use it every day.”

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