Email Mining: Emerging Techniques for Email Management

I. Katakis, G. Tsoumakas, I. Vlahavas, “Email Mining: Emerging Techniques for Email Management”, Web Data Management Practices: Emerging Techniques and Technologies, Athena Vakali, George Pallis (Ed.), Idea Group Publishing, pp. 219-240, 2006.

Web Data Management Practices: Emerging Techniques and Technologies, Athena Vakali, George Pallis (Ed.), Idea Group Publishing, pp. 219-240, 2006.

email, e-mail, mining, text, data streams, email classification, email clustering, automatic answering, spam filtering, text mining

Email has met tremendous popularity over the past few years. People are sending and receiving many messages per day, communicating with partners and friends, or exchanging files and information. Unfortunately, the phenomenon of email overload has grown over the past years becoming a personal headache for users and a financial issue for companies. In this chapter, we will discuss how disciplines like Machine Learning and Data Mining can contribute to the solution of the problem by constructing intelligent techniques which automate email managing tasks and what advantages they hold over other conventional solutions. We will also discuss the particularity of email data and what special treatment it requires. Some interesting email mining applications like mail categorization, summarization, automatic answering and spam filtering will be also presented.