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The aim of this paper is to construct a systematic way of thinking about correspondence as a documentary form and discuss the role its persistent representation features play in management, preservation and access of email correspondence.

Using the method of diplomatic analysis as a guiding theory, the paper conducts a historical review of correspondence recordkeeping and email systems in the American context, analyzes the evolution of its persistent representation features and discusses the implications on current email management and archival practices.

Correspondence as a document form and its persistent representation features have played an important role in traditional correspondence recordkeeping and electronic mail management. The design of systems to manage, preserve and access email records should reflect the characteristics and functionality of email records, capable of retaining email correspondence as a documentary form supported by its persistent representation features.

The research in this paper mostly covers secondary sources with a regional focus. The analysis covers important historical developments in correspondence and email recordkeeping and archival practices. The study uses examples of email archives available online, and further research can be developed when more email archival collections are processed and constructed.

A systematic analysis of persistent representation of traditional correspondence and electronic mail provides a useful perspective to reflect on the characteristics of correspondence as a document form and offers some food for thought for records management and archival professionals and assists them in developing systems to better manage, preserve and provide access to email correspondence.

This paper aims to describe an interdisciplinary and innovative research conducted in Switzerland, at the Geneva School of Business Administration HES-SO and supported by the State Archives of Neuchâtel (Office des archives de l'État de Neuchâtel, OAEN). The problem to be addressed is one of the most classical ones: how to extract and discriminate relevant data in a huge amount of diversified and complex data record formats and contents. The goal of this study is to provide a framework and a proof of concept for a software that helps taking defensible decisions on the retention and disposal of records and data proposed to the OAEN. For this purpose, the authors designed two axes: the archival axis, to propose archival metrics for the appraisal of structured and unstructured data, and the data mining axis to propose algorithmic methods as complementary or/and additional metrics for the appraisal process.

Based on two axes, this exploratory study designs and tests the feasibility of archival metrics that are paired to data mining metrics, to advance, as much as possible, the digital appraisal process in a systematic or even automatic way. Under Axis 1, the authors have initiated three steps: first, the design of a conceptual framework to records data appraisal with a detailed three-dimensional approach (trustworthiness, exploitability, representativeness). In addition, the authors defined the main principles and postulates to guide the operationalization of the conceptual dimensions. Second, the operationalization proposed metrics expressed in terms of variables supported by a quantitative method for their measurement and scoring. Third, the authors shared this conceptual framework proposing the dimensions and operationalized variables (metrics) with experienced professionals to validate them. The expert’s feedback finally gave the authors an idea on: the relevance and the feasibility of these metrics. Those two aspects may demonstrate the acceptability of such method in a real-life archival practice. In parallel, Axis 2 proposes functionalities to cover not only macro analysis for data but also the algorithmic methods to enable the computation of digital archival and data mining metrics. Based on that, three use cases were proposed to imagine plausible and illustrative scenarios for the application of such a solution.

The main results demonstrate the feasibility of measuring the value of data and records with a reproducible method. More specifically, for Axis 1, the authors applied the metrics in a flexible and modular way. The authors defined also the main principles needed to enable computational scoring method. The results obtained through the expert’s consultation on the relevance of 42 metrics indicate an acceptance rate above 80%. In addition, the results show that 60% of all metrics can be automated. Regarding Axis 2, 33 functionalities were developed and proposed under six main types: macro analysis, microanalysis, statistics, retrieval, administration and, finally, the decision modeling and machine learning. The relevance of metrics and functionalities is based on the theoretical validity and computational character of their method. These results are largely satisfactory and promising.

This study offers a valuable aid to improve the validity and performance of archival appraisal processes and decision-making. Transferability and applicability of these archival and data mining metrics could be considered for other types of data. An adaptation of this method and its metrics could be tested on research data, medical data or banking data.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate strategies to appraise email correspondence to select significant email for permanent preservation without capturing trivial or personal emails. The strategies were tested on the actual email accounts of selected individuals occupying important roles within an important cultural institution in the Northeastern USA.

Treating this art museum as a case study site, email messages are manually appraised for retention using a rubric. Following the appraisal, strategies for expediting this appraisal process, using what is learned from the manual appraisal process, are explored.

A major finding of this study is that sent mail is almost always significant, although preserving only sent mail, or preserving sent mail in combination with inbox items that have been acted upon (replied to or forwarded), are not sufficient to capture significant correspondence. Rather, a social network approach holds the most promise to accelerate the process of email appraisal.

This study provides empirically grounded strategies for appraising email for permanent retention.

Personal information management (PIM) is an activity in which an individual stores personal information items in order to retrieve them later on. As PIM research moves from an infant stage of exploratory studies to more rigorous quantitative ones, there is a need to identify and map variables that characterize and account for the variety of PIM behaviour. This is the aim of the current research.

In an exploratory study, 20 semi-structured 90-minute interviews were recorded and transcribed. Variables were found by comparing the behaviors of participants who represent the two extreme poles of each variable's axis (i.e. when two participants showed a high and low degree of document redundancy, the redundancy variable was identified). In a later analysis, the variables were grouped into categories.

The paper identifies 15 variables grouped in five categories: organization related variables (order, redundancy and name meaning), structure variables (collection size, folder depth, folder breadth and folder size), work process variables (attendance time and modality), memory related variables (memory reliance, dominant memory) and retrieval variables (retrieval type, retrieval success, retrieval time and ubiquity).

Future research could make use of these variables in order to: measure their distribution, find relations between them, test how they are affected by variables external to PIM (e.g. systems design) and find how they affect other dependent variables (e.g. productivity).

This is the first research that systematically explores PIM variables.

The use of email by employees at the Danwood Group was studied and it was found that the interrupt effect from emails is more than generally believed. Employees allowed themselves to be interrupted almost as frequently as telephone calls and the common reaction to the arrival of an email is to react almost as quickly as they would respond to telephone calls. This means the interrupt effect is comparable with that of a telephone call. The recovery time from an email interruption was found to be significantly less than the published recovery time for telephone calls. It is to be concluded, therefore, that while Email is still less disruptive than the telephone, the way the majority of users handle their incoming email has been shown to give far more interruption than expected. By analysing the data captured the authors have been able to create recommendations for a set of guidelines for email usage within the workplace that will increase employee efficiency by reducing the prominence of interruptions, restricting the use of email‐to‐all messages, setting‐up the email application to display three lines of the email and to check for email less frequently. It is recommended that training should be given to staff on how to use email more effectively to increase employee productivity.

In an effort to evaluate if and how emojis might boost customer engagement in email marketing, the current research aims to analyzes emojis' effects and investigates how certain features, such as the type of emoji or the way of emojis' presentation (repetition and position), moderate their effectiveness.

This research comprises four experimental studies. The first two analyze whether the presence and the type of emoji (facial vs non-facial) influence customer engagement. Then, two more studies analyze the influence of the presence and type of emoji, as well as repetitions (repetition vs no repetitions) and positions (left vs right). The data collection is through email marketing campaigns, with two types of brands. The analysis is a fractional factorial design in one- and two-way interactions to identify the influence of presentation features.

Emojis influence customer engagement and can trigger interactive behaviors and increase customer engagement, even in a channel that generally is less prone to interaction. The emojis increase the probability of opening the email, the number of times email gets opened and clicks to access additional content.

The varied results suggest the need for more research to confirm the findings regarding presentation features. This research offers novel implications for interactive marketing and the theory of visual rhetoric because the research establishes how visual stimuli such as emojis can persuade and capture customer attention and increase customer engagement.

Practitioners can optimize email marketing by using emojis strategically to attract audience interest, provoke interactions, build relationships and generate word of mouth, leading to better consumer experiences, loyalty and brand profitability.

Most studies use semantic analysis to analyze emojis; the current study instead tests whether emojis can increase customer engagement in a less-interactive channel and then also considers the moderating role of several emoji-relevant variables. In addition, the authors apply the theory of visual rhetoric to explicate the original findings, which are gathered from a unique data set involving real marketing campaigns.

The purpose of this study is to explore how the opening phrase of a phishing email influences the action taken by the recipient.

Two types of phishing emails were sent to 593 employees, who were asked to provide personally identifiable information (PII). A personalised spear phishing email opening was randomly used in half of the emails.

Nineteen per cent of the employees provided their PII in a general phishing email, compared to 29 per cent in the spear phishing condition. Employees having a high power distance cultural background were more likely to provide their PII, compared to those with a low one. There was no effect of age on providing the PII requested when the recipient’s years of service within the organisation is taken into account.

This research shows that success is higher when the opening sentence of a phishing email is personalised. The resulting model explains victimisation by phishing emails well, and it would allow practitioners to focus awareness campaigns to maximise their effect.

The innovative aspect relates to explaining spear phishing using four socio-demographic variables.

This paper considers whether copyright has a future in an electronic environment. A number of issues face copyright owners in the networked environment, most of them caused by the ease with which materials can be copied. Some relevant examples of legal cases are considered. Some responses to the stresses, in terms of both attitudes and legislation, such as the EU Database Directive and the EU Draft Directive on Copyright, are considered. It is concluded that copyright is unlikely to survive in its present form, and that attempts to strengthen it by means of increasing owner rights could be counterproductive. Innovative thinking and ideas are necessary, together with increased owner‐user co‐operation, if copyright is to survive.

Email is a rapid and cheapest medium of sharing information, whereas unsolicited email (spam) is constant trouble in the email communication. The rapid growth of the spam creates a necessity to build a reliable and robust spam classifier. This paper aims to presents a study of evolutionary classifiers (genetic algorithm [GA] and genetic programming [GP]) without/with the help of an ensemble of classifiers method. In this research, the classifiers ensemble has been developed with adaptive boosting technique.

Text mining methods are applied for classifying spam emails and legitimate emails. Two data sets (Enron and SpamAssassin) are taken to test the concerned classifiers. Initially, pre-processing is performed to extract the features/words from email files. Informative feature subset is selected from greedy stepwise feature subset search method. With the help of informative features, a comparative study is performed initially within the evolutionary classifiers and then with other popular machine learning classifiers (Bayesian, naive Bayes and support vector machine).

This study reveals the fact that evolutionary algorithms are promising in classification and prediction applications where genetic programing with adaptive boosting is turned out not only an accurate classifier but also a sensitive classifier. Results show that initially GA performs better than GP but after an ensemble of classifiers (a large number of iterations), GP overshoots GA with significantly higher accuracy. Amongst all classifiers, boosted GP turns out to be not only good regarding classification accuracy but also low false positive (FP) rates, which is considered to be the important criteria in email spam classification. Also, greedy stepwise feature search is found to be an effective method for feature selection in this application domain.

The research implication of this research consists of the reduction in cost incurred because of spam/unsolicited bulk email. Email is a fundamental necessity to share information within a number of units of the organizations to be competitive with the business rivals. In addition, it is continually a hurdle for internet service providers to provide the best emailing services to their customers. Although, the organizations and the internet service providers are continuously adopting novel spam filtering approaches to reduce the number of unwanted emails, the desired effect could not be significantly seen because of the cost of installation, customizable ability and the threat of misclassification of important emails. This research deals with all the issues and challenges faced by internet service providers and organizations.

In this research, the proposed models have not only provided excellent performance accuracy, sensitivity with low FP rate, customizable capability but also worked on reducing the cost of spam. The same models may be used for other applications of text mining also such as sentiment analysis, blog mining, news mining or other text mining research.

A comparison between GP and GAs has been shown with/without ensemble in spam classification application domain.

This paper aims to build on Fred Beard’s study of the world’s archives to identity historical advertising and marketing ephemera, published in this journal in 2018, by focussing on resources available in Europe to augment his survey.

Online searching, supplemented by literature emanating from the business archive sector, led to the identification of 177 repositories or online sites in Europe holding advertising and marketing archives of significance for researchers. These are set out in two accompanying tables.

A wide diversity of European archives that are open to researchers is revealed in this paper. Many are the archives of the business themselves, but a number of collecting repositories are also listed, brought together for the first time.

This paper focusses solely on Europe but does not claim to be comprehensive, as the study was time-limited and readers will, no doubt, know of resources that the author has missed. The findings relate mostly to Western Europe, so there is scope for further study to encompass archives in the former eastern bloc. Exploration of sources in Africa, Asia and Latin America would further supplement Beard’s original study.

This research brings together the broadest list of advertising and marketing sources open to researchers in Europe published to date. As Beard’s focus was more on the Americas, this examination redresses the balance with an array of European sources which, it is hoped, will contribute to the greater use of many little-known or under-researched resources by researchers across the world.