Series consists of email messages sent or received by Fellman from his SFU email account (fellman_AT_sfu.ca). Activities documented include personal correspondence with family and friends; exchanges with other scholars relating to research interests; correspondence with his literary agent, publishers, and media outlets; academic and professional work, including conference attendance, teaching, supervision of graduate students, and SFU administrative duties; and Fellman's work as a board member of Jewish Family Services Vancouver and the College of Psychologists of British Columbia. Activities, topics, and correspondents overlap considerably with records (paper, analog, and digital) contained in all other series in the fonds.
The vast bulk of the emails date from 2000-2008. That Fellman's account was still active after 2008 is indicated by a small number of 2012 sent emails, print copies of post-2008 emails included in the paper files, and the fact that a large number of emails were received by the account after his death (mostly deleted by the archivist, see the General note on appraisal below). In 2008-2009 SFU moved to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite email platform. Most of Fellman's surviving email predates this switch, as indicated by the mailbox folder names ("Eudora/" and "SFUWebmail-old/"). All this suggests that virtually all Fellman's email from his Zimbra account was deleted at some point in 2012 and that what survives in the email archive are mainly messages carried forward from the old systems.
The Archives has retained the email as a single series, with no arrangement into sub-series. At the time the account was backed up and put offline (2013), the email was organized into three main groups of folders: the Inbox and Outbox of the current Zimbra account; a group of folders originating with the Eudora email platform; and a third group labelled "SFUWebmail-old." This mailbox structure is preserved in the email archive as processed by the archivist, and the messages can all be viewed in the context of their original folders at time of transfer.
The archivist used ePADD software to process the email and applied only minimal post-transfer curation: basic descriptive information was provided at the ePADD collection and accession levels (see the note on Finding aids below); appraisal and selection was applied (see the General note on appraisal below); and the list of correspondents was normalized where possible so that an individual's various email aliases are grouped under a single entry in the form LastName, FirstName. But no tags, annotations or restrictions were applied at the individual message level.
Note that there is some overlap with series 7, Desktop correspondence and working files. Some of the electronic documents retained by Fellman on his computer (series 7) appear to be copies of messages exported / migrated from the email system to Word or text documents.