This research examines the role of electronic messaging in business firms. The study presents a taxonomy of electronic mail uses, develops a theoretical framework for analyzing electronic mail impact, and investigates risks and advantages of electronic messaging. The research focus is intermediate-size firms.

The use of email as a communication and information sharing medium in large, complex, globally distributed engineering projects is widespread; yet there exists little understanding of the content of the emails exchanged and the implications of this content on the design project, design records and contracts. The importance of these issues is underlined by the fact that email records can now be required as evidence in legal disputes. It follows that the overall aim of this research is to assess the role and use of email in engineering design projects. A state-of-the-art review of literature pertaining to email is reported, along with a review of information and communication processes in engineering design projects. The primary contribution of this thesis is the creation of a content based approach for analysing the role and use of email in engineering design projects. This centres on the development and application of a coding scheme to email text, identifying what subject matter an email relates to, why it was sent, and how its content is expressed. Results are then analysed with respect to the frequencies of each code and other variables, including how coding varies between different senders and throughout the project duration. The second key contribution of this thesis is the analysis of emails and content in an engineering setting by applying the aforementioned approach to two case studies. The major case study concerned a large, complex, globally distributed, multimillion pound systems engineering project, from which 16 000 emails were obtained. It was found that emails are mainly used to transfer information but also to support management functions. Emails facilitate design work but little of this takes place explicitly in the email content. Characteristics of a project affect the subject matter or emails but have little effect on why they are sent. User roles and personal preferences also influence email use. If was found that the purposes for sending emails varied over the duration of a project; it was further determined that these changes could be used to identify project progress and design activity. Implications of the findings are identified in relation to: information management, knowledge management, project management, collaboration and email practice. Significantly, emails do contain potentially important design information and because these often support decisions made elsewhere, emails should be integrated with wider records. More consideration and training should be given to the use of project standards for email use and guidelines for composition. Changes in email use over the project duration could be a potential tool for project managers to identify design progress and possible issues in a project.

Email provides the average person with the ability to instantaneously communicate with people across the planet. However, the ease of this communication not only allows people to exchange information, but can also generate a large volume of messages. The methods of interacting with this repository currently in use are far from adequate. This thesis focuses on the development of a new interface for managing one's inbox and mail folders. The approach provides the user with a data visualization of an overview of the entire mailbox, or a chosen subset, at once. The tool includes interactions that allow a user to focus his or her attention on specific email and delve deeper into it in a simple intuitive fashion. A user study confirmed the usefulness of the resulting system.

Zugl.: Giessen, Universiẗat, Diss., 2007.

<p>SMTP, the current protocol for sending electronic mail (e-mail) over the Internet, has for many years suffered from several problems and limitations. When it was designed, well over twenty years ago, the requirements for e-mail were very different from those of today. A message was a text message in English, and both user and machine were explicitly named in the address. The protocol was not designed to transfer other types of messages, and no mechanism was included to verify the identity of the sender.</p><p>In order to solve these shortcomings, a new e-mail protocol needs to be defined. This report specifies a basis for what such a protocol may look like. The protocol has been designed to be easy to modify and expand, as well as to benefit from more recent ideas and technology. Binary message content is transferred without conversion, sender addresses are verified, and the address format is flexible. Along with the specification of the protocol, a sample implementation has been provided.</p>

In 1976, Diffie and Hellman proposed the concept of public key cryptosystem (PKC). The application and research of public key cryptography are arisen in the modern cryptography. In 2005, Sun, Hsieh, and Hwang (S.H.H.) proposed an electronic mail protocol based on classic public key cryptography. The technique of the Certificate of Encrypted Message Being a Signature (CEMBS) that Bao proposed in 1998 is applied on session key sharing of their e-mail system. In the same year, Dent pointed out that the first one of S.H.H.¡¦s e-mail protocols cannot suffice the property of forward secrecy. Thus, Kim, Koo, and Lee (K.K.L.) proposed two e-mail protocols based on signcryption concept which is proposed by Zheng in 1997 to overcome the flaw of S.H.H.¡¦s e-mail protocol in 2006. Lin, Lin, and Wang (L.L.W.) pointed out that the second one of S.H.H.¡¦s protocols cannot achieve forward secrecy and then they improved the protocol. In 2007, Yoon and Yoo claimed that the second one of K.K.L.¡¦s protocols is still vulnerable to two possible forgery attacks. In this thesis, we will make deep discussions about secure e-mail protocols based on PKC with providing the property of forward secrecy and then build a novel e-mail protocol to withstand the above attacks. Our proposed e-mail protocol can achieve the properties of authentication, confidentiality, integrity, non-repudiation and forward secrecy.

Social interactions affect the onset and maintenance of major depressive disorder (MDD; e.g., Hammen, 2006). However, little research has examined depressed people’s communications in daily life. This dissertation’s primary aim is to test three models of the association between MDD and everyday communication. The disclosure model suggests that people with MDD, particularly if currently depressed, communicate about themselves and their distress. The social disengagement model suggests that people with MDD, particularly if currently depressed, communicate less. The selectivity model suggests that people with MDD, particularly if currently depressed, communicate more negatively only with people with whom they have closer relationships. This dissertation’s second aim is to investigate associations between communication patterns of individuals with MDD and residual depressive symptoms. Sixteen women with MDD and 15 never-depressed women submitted a year’s worth of their e-mails with up to ten correspondents. For participants with MDD the year included at least one month of depression and one month of remission. E-mails were submitted to computerized text analysis. For the primary research question, the study design was conceptualized as a 2x2 between-subjects (MDD vs. never-depressed) x within-subjects (currently depressed vs. not currently depressed) ANOVA missing one cell (never-depressed individuals with currently depression). Data were e-mails nested within correspondents within participants and were analyzed using multi-level regression. For the second research question, OLS regression analyses were used. People with MDD e-mailed their correspondents marginally more frequently when in a depressive episode, suggesting increased efforts at engagement. During episodes, however, participants showed less verbal synchrony with their correspondents. This suggests that despite reaching out more, currently depressed people are less attuned with others. People with major depressive disorder used more positive emotion words and fewer negative emotion words than never-depressed controls. Although there was a general pattern among participants of using more negative emotion words with correspondents with whom they had closer relationships, this tendency was accentuated in depressed individuals in current major depressive episodes. These findings are consistent with the view that individuals – particularly when depressed – regulate aspects of their communication to protect and manage their social relationships. / text

This dissertation proposes a model supporting the creation of trustable privacies in public online spaces, with the model demonstrating the potential for supporting trustable data handling in the qualitative domain. Privacy and trust, from the pivotal perspective of the individual were identified as crucial intangibles in the qualitative research and personal trust domains. That both privacy and trust depend heavily upon credible mechanisms for privacy became clear during the literature review and interview processes. Privacy, in its many forms, is a concept requiring greatly varying degrees of anonymity, confidentiality and control (Rotenberg, 2001; Lessig, 1998) and this was position was validated by literature and by qualitative comments by academic interviewees. Facilitation of secondary users including academics, public and private organisations, communities, casual information browsers is a goal of this research. This goal of facilitation is supported by the model proposed, and is discussed in Chapter 6, where future work is discussed. The core requirement to address confidentiality, ethics, privacy, ownership and control of data (Corti, 2000) is satisfied by the model as proposed and discussed. Expected outcomes of this research project are summarised as: • Proposed model for the creation of trustable privacies in public spaces. [Primary outcome] • Promotion of collaboration amongst domains and disciplines through improved universal access to archived data [Secondary outcome] • Identification of application domains outside of the initially identified domain set [Secondary outcome]. Self-Contained ReposItory ProcesSIng Template (SCRIPSIT) describes a model supporting a decentralised, trustable set of structures and mechanisms. SCRIPSIT has its eponymous origin in the Latin word scripsit, meaning "he or she wrote". / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2004.

This quasi-experimental, pre-and-post-test, multi-method design examined e-prompting, and its impact on adherence to a desk-situated workplace exercise program. Fifty volunteer inactive office workers were recruited from a Canadian college. The intervention tested the effectiveness of a 12-week, twice-daily, low resistance, exercise band program with or without e-prompting. Pre-and-post-test data were collected through two questionnaires and measurements of strength/endurance. Additionally, the intranet exercise web site recorded participants' frequency log in data. Quantitative findings showed significant strength improvements in three of the measures (leg press, chest press, bicep curl). Data from the pre-and-post questionnaires found significant positive movement in four questions. Analysis of qualitative data identified two themes, barrier to physical activity and convenience suggesting that the intervention enhanced participants' self-efficacy to perform and adhere to an exercise program. The combination of e-prompting combined with a desk exercise program appears to have the potential to increase physical activity among inactive office workers.

Thesis (M.A.)--Carleton University, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-113). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.