E-mail mining: Emerging techniques for e-mail management

E-mail 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 e-mail 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 that automate e-mail managing tasks and what advantages they hold over other conventional solutions. We will also discuss the particularity of e-mail data and what special treatment they require. Some interesting e-mail mining applications like mail categorization, summarization, automatic answering, and spam filtering will also be presented.