Email Psychology Survey

MaCorr Research has recently conducted a study to better understand perceptions of email users toward personal and work email accounts.

The survey was conducted online among geographically representative sample of 1,002 US adults 18-65 years of age, who regularly use home and work e-mail accounts.

Among other finding, when asked to define their own “e-mail personality”, 55% of regular work and home email users thought they are “Deleters”, 30% – “Filers”, 10% – “Hoarders” and 10% – “Printers”.
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Deleter – 55%: You are conscientious and only keep an active inbox, deleting unnecessary e-mails and filing relevant ones. You respond to messages quickly and can be ruthless when deciding whether or not to reply.

Filer – 30%: You regularly start e-mail contact, and your e-mails are generally light hearted. Although you don’t answer immediately you wouldn’t leave it more than 1 day. You deal with a lot of e-mail so use inbox folders to keep conversations organized.

Hoarder – 10%: You have a relaxed attitude to e-mail. You rarely file or delete and don’t pay too much attention to how your email tone might sound. You only answer to e-mails when you are ready.

Printer – 5%: You print e-mails to read them and may also put them in paper files. You always reply with a prepared, considered response, so it could be that some e-mails aren’t answered for a number of days. You are polite and traditional in tone and language.

60% of the regular work and home email users find that “Being asked out on a date” and “Announcing major life decisions” are the most acceptable over e-mail. 59% also think that “Using improper grammar…” in email would not be a problem, as well.
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Not surprisingly, “Intelligence” is what regular home and work email users judge the most in other peoples’ emails. “Intelligence” is also what they would like to “transmit” by purposefully adapting language, style or tone of their own e-mails.
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Finally, the next day email reply is quite acceptable. Only 10% of the regular email users will become offended at having to wait for a reply for less than a day.
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