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.

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We present an algorithm for extracting object descriptions from free-hand sketches of remembered scenes, drawn as video retrieval queries. Our sketches depict scene content, as well as indicators of motion. We report an exploratory study investigating how people sketch to depict recalled events. We incorporate several observations from this study into the design of a novel sketch parsing algorithm. We draw upon a temporal HMM classifier to recognise common pictograms, and graph-cut to identify more general objects.