Rethinking email message and people search

ABSTRACT

We show how a number of novel email search features can be implemented without any kind of natural language processing (NLP) or advanced data mining. Our approach inspects the email headers of all messages a user has ever sent or received and it creates simple per-contact summaries, including simple information about the message exchange history, the domain of the sender or even the sender's gender. With these summaries advanced questions/tasks such as "Who do I still need to reply to?" or "Find 'fun' messages sent by friends." become possible. As a proof of concept, we implemented a Mozilla-Thunderbird extension, adding powerful people search to the popular email client.

REFERENCES

• 1: Krisztian Balog , Maarten de Rijke, Finding experts and their eetails in e-mail corpora, Proceedings of the 15th international conference on World Wide Web, May 23-26, 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland [doi>10.1145/1135777.1136002]
• 2: Christopher S. Campbell , Paul P. Maglio , Alex Cozzi , Byron Dom, Expertise identification using email communications, Proceedings of the twelfth international conference on Information and knowledge management, November 03-08, 2003, New Orleans, LA, USA [doi>10.1145/956863.956965]
• 3: A. Culotta, R. Bekkerman, and A. McCallum. Extracting social networks and contact information from email and the web. In The 1st Conference on Email and Anti-Spam (CEAS), 2004.
• 4: P. Kazienko and K. Musial. Mining personal social features in the community of email users. In The 34th Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science (SOFSEM), pages 708--719, 2008.
• 5: S. Michel and I. Weber. Eagleeye -- reclaim your address book, 2008. http://eagleeye.sourceforge.net.
• 6: A. Smith and M. Brezina. Xobni -- it's inbox backwards., 2007. http://www.xobni.com.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
email, email search, inbox 2.0, people search