Smart mail – a smart platform for mail management

Abstract

Email is a key communication format in a digital world, both for professional and/or personal usage. Exchanged messages (both human and automatically generated) have reached such a volume that processing them can be a great challenge for human users that try to do it on a daily basis and in an efficient manner. In fact, a significant amount of their time is spent searching and getting context information (normally historic information) in order to prepare a reply message or to take a decision/action, when compared to the actual time required for writing a reply. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for this process to use both automatic and semi-automatic mechanisms that allow to put email messages into context. Since context information is given, not only by historical email messages but also inferred from the relationship between contacts and/or organizations present in the messages, the existence of navigation mechanisms (and even exploration ones) between contacts and entities associated to email messages, is of fundamental importance. This is the main purpose of the SMART Mail prototype, which architecture, data visualization and exploration components and AI algorithms, are presented throughout this paper.