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Automatically addressing mail: SEAmail, a semantic e-mail addressing system, lets users send messages without necessarily knowing recipients' e-mail addresses or even names. An interface, shown above, is used to define the characteristics of intended recipients, and the system takes care of the rest.
Michael Genesereth/Stanford Logic Group
"This technology has clear benefits, but it's also ripe for misuse," says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington. "The technical issues are solvable. The tricky things are the social issues. How do we create a workable system, given the vagaries of human nature?" In particular, Etzioni worries that, if the tool were broadly available, some people would receive overwhelming amounts of mail, without a good way to limit it. While semantic tools could be used to create filters for e-mails coming in, he says that there's no clear way to control the flow of incoming mail without also losing out on some of the serendipitous messages that make such a system useful.
Assuming that worries about spam could be properly resolved, semantic e-mail addressing might be interesting in combination with other semantic approaches, says Luke McDowell, an assistant professor of computer science at the United States Naval Academy, in Annapolis, MD. McDowell worked on a system that extracted information from the body of e-mails to simplify the process of planning parties and agreeing on meeting times. In general, he says, semantic tools could help people manage their e-mails better by using contextual knowledge to automate tasks.
SEAmail will be used at Stanford later this year as part of a larger "digital department" project that aims to introduce several semantic technologies, Genesereth says. The computer-science department will use the system first, but the plan is for the technology to spread through the university until everyone has the option of using SEAmail. He sees the technology as having a lot of potential for internal use by large businesses, for which its benefits far outweigh the potential for abuse. However, with more refinement, he says, it could eventually become a tool for the broader Internet too.
One of the Internet's oldest tools is getting a whole new set of functions.
Semantic technology could keep numbers tied to the information that explains what they mean.
Seems to me that this system makes it much more likely to accidentally send emails to places they shouldn't go. Either because you didn't specify the destination criteria quite correctly, or because the system itself had bad data or bugs.
The full paper the researchers wrote discusses this problem, and suggests showing people either a) a provisional list of who they're sending a message to or b) a sample of names from the list, along with the number of recipients. That way, if you put in some requirements that would send an e-mail to 1,000 people, you do have a way of knowing that.
Doesn't this skip over social networking?
I think the real issue here that wasn’t addressed in the article is that this system is entirely skipping over the entire burgeoning field of social networking. Yes, people want to be able to find everyone in a group or community, but there are social networking systems to do that like FaceBook, LinkedIn, or IBM Lotus Connections.
There’s a rich set of social connection and community functionality - creating, joining, inviting, disbanding, leaving, mining, referring, federating - that people want to do with networks. The richer functionality (being able to auto-lookup someone's most recent email address is fine) described by this addressing system seems to ditch all of that in favor of a query that determines your inclusion or exclusion based on a database without injecting the human effort that goes into nourishing and pruning one’s group and community memberships.
FYI - I did a full posting on this: http://knowledgeforward.wordpress.com/2009/01/23/who-wants-queries-in-emails-to-field-dont-include-me-in-that-query-result/
Guest (andrewmurniadi)
How about adding a trust system so that mails can be filtered based on trust level. There are lots of number of criteria that can be included and even a reference system and certifying agents (such as corporate, spam filters, etc) can be set up to ensure the quality of the emails. This will also have the advantage of tapping the potential of the internet and helps built security in the internet.
To: All developers of email systems working on dumb ideas
Could you please focus some of your immense brainpower on trying to reduce the amount of ridiculous email I get instead of trying to find ways to send me more. I've had the same email address for about 17 years now and you can guess how much email I get. Could you use this technology to put me in a category "does not wish to get emails containing dumb jokes, marginally funny but embarrassing photos, offers for you know what, etc. I know you are smart enough to do this - and if you succeed, I promise to quit sending you these plaintive emails.
Regards,
Overflowing In Box
Re: To: All developers of email systems working on dumb ideas
As a co-author of the article and someone who has had the same email address for 15 years, I understand spam. The article proposes semantic filtering. Personally, I use a whitelist that requires the sender from a previously unknown address to use a code word. This is easily found by an individual who really wants to contact me, rather than a program or a careless person.
But please do read the entire article. You can of course access it at the IEEE digital library or you can download a pdf from the author's site at
http://logic.stanford.edu/sharing/papers/ic-sea.pdf
Re: To: All developers of email systems working on dumb ideas
Now that you have had a chance to read the article in full, you may understand that SEAmail will result in no more spam than you are getting now, and possibly less. One reason is that it is targeted only for closed systems such as an Intranet exactly for control purposes.
Another reason is that even on the open Internet, spammers can already target demographics and use of SEAmail would at least narrow their focus, allowing some people to be bypassed. Though whether spammers would take advantage of this or not depends upon the cost of sending email, which now is small. (This second reason is a corollary of the general theorem that no property of SEAmail is worse than that of normal email and some properties are much better.)
The third reason is that SEAmail allows semantic filtering, as described in the article.
It should also be pointed out that social networks are an excellent platform for deploying SEAmail and that current email systems there are only marginally "semantic" though there is great potential to go in that direction.
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Bruceahz
38 Comments
Someone must love spam
I don't think I could come up with a better tool for increasing spam if I tried. If I understand the tool, I can send email to everybody in the US, say, who meet criteria buried in databases scattered around the internet. I don't know these people, they haven't indicated an interest in communicating with me, yet I can send them email. Didn't we have to pass laws setting up do-not-call lists to stop the equivalent problem with telephone numbers?
With this system I might send my message to email addresses that these people-I-don't-know have set aside for particular purposes (unrelated to me, for sure)
For example, I have a Yahoo address I use when I'm forced to enter an address to access data on a site, but where I don't really care to get email from the site, an email address associated with my business, and a personal email address for communications with my friends. Do I want this system to "override" this logic? No way!
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Erica Naone
70 Comments
Re: Someone must love spam
That's exactly the reason that they're focusing on using it within organizations for the time being.
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fiberman
186 Comments
Re: Someone must love spam
Wouldn't a "Do not email" list be wonderful! But nobody really cares about reducing spam, since it drives the economy of the Internet. Simply charge a penny an email and we put spammers out of business, but probably Cisco, IBM, AT&T, Verizon, etc. too.
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