Analysis and comparison of current e-mail clients
Name
Mart Sein
Abstract
E-mail is one of the most important media of communication in the Internet. It helps users with different location and time exchange messages. As the number of e-mails people receive grows higher, managing them becomes more difficult.
Finding useful info from a large amount of e-mails manually is a big challenge. Therefore modern e-mail clients are mostly designed with the aim of facilitating the management of e-mails and the data they contain.
At the moment, the mail clients mostly only support text searches — i.e. you can only search for content that explicitly exists in the messages. They lack the ability to “read between the lines” and put different pieces of information together. This means that it is very hard to answer questions like "Who do I still have to reply to?" or "Is this message work-related?". Doing that would require the client to understand what the context and meaning behind the message really is.[madrid]
Using some sort of artificial intelligence would help to solve some of these problems. Several client extensions already take advantage of these systems to try to understand the content of the message. The e-mails can then be categorized for the users. However, the AI usually needs training by the user, which limits its effectiveness. Therefore the ultimate goal would be having a system that understands the content of messages without training and for that reason is able to answer the types of questions mentioned earlier.[aiemail]
As the previously described systems are not yet present in e-mail clients, the information needs to be found using currently available methods. The first aim of this paper is to give an overview of search features in current e-mail clients. The second goal is analyzing the possibilities of solving complex search cases with current e-mail clients.
The work is divided into four chapters based on the subject. The first chapter introduces the topic and explains the selection of e-mail clients and test data. The second chapter gives an overview of the search features present in current e-mail clients and compares them. The third chapter focuses on solving complex search cases with the current clients. The fourth chapter analyzes one of the tools present at the moment — Mozilla Thunderbird add-on TaQuilla — that uses artificial intelligence to help manage e-mails.
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Bachelor - Computer Science
Supervisor(s)
Tõnu Tamme, Ulrich Norbisrath
Defence year
2011