Rethinking email message and people search

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. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: H.3.1 Content Analysis and Indexing; H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval; H.3.4 Systems and Software General Terms Design, Human Factors Keywords email, inbox 2.0, email search, people search

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Sebastian Michel, Ingmar Weber
• Keywords: Email Headers, Internet Technology, Popular Email Client, Simple Per-contact Summaries, WWW 2009