| Summary: | The article aims to understand the characteristics of email management activity and how managers swamped with emails cope with their experiences of this activity. Different methods were employed to gather different perspectives of the situated activity. Observation, diaries, in-depth interviews and questionnaires were used on two panels of volunteer managers. This article is based on the description of 4 particularly overloaded managers with varying procedures for dealing with emails. The results describe their socio-professional contexts, their continuous daily connection and the harmful effects on their health and work efficiency. The article emphasizes the specificities of reading/filing/writing emails – processes that are cognitively and emotionally costly for these managers. It identifies 5 categories of “problematic” email and the negative emotions associated with them, underlining the lack of common rules between interlocutors. A certain number of recommendations are discussed to imagine the future of electronic messaging.
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