Patent Application
20070294428
The subject matter regarded as the invention is particularly pointed out and distinctly claimed in the concluding portion of the specification. The invention, both as to organization and method of operation, together with objects, features, and advantages thereof, may best be understood by reference to the following detailed description when read with the accompanying drawings in which:
It will be appreciated that for simplicity and clarity of illustration, elements shown in the figures have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements may be exaggerated relative to other elements for clarity. Further, where considered appropriate, reference numbers may be repeated among the figures to indicate corresponding or analogous features.
In the following detailed description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of the invention. However, it will be understood by those skilled in the art that the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, and components have not been described in detail so as not to obscure the present invention.
The described method and system provide a prompt when a user is forwarding, replying to, or sending an email message, to check if the email is intended to be sent to the message addressees. The described method and system provide an opportunistic approach which aims to prevent irrelevant email messages being sent.
Email applications are extended in a way that assists email users in sending messages to the correct addressees in groups and helps users avoid common mistakes related to email addressee groups. According to the described approach, upon sending an email message to a group (either a predefined group or just a set of several individual addresses), the email user may be provided with appropriate recommendations and warnings, based an organizational chart, the user's own social or contact network, and other factors as described below.
Referring to
The email client application 103 communicates via a network 105 with other client computer systems 106-108 each running their own email client application. A server system 110 provides an email server application 112 for the email client application 103.
The email client application 103 enables a user to organize their email messages by creating folders for storing mail 128, searching through email messages, keeping an address book of people to whom the user sends email messages, creating group mailing lists, creating and adding a signature file, and many more functions.
In the described system, an agent 120 is provided which reviews a list of intended recipients in an email message created by a user to check if the list of intended recipients is likely to include any incorrect recipients. The agent 120 reviews the list of intended recipients using a provided algorithm. A prompt 125 is provided in the form of a dialogue box on the email user interface 102 if the agent 120 determines that the user should review one or more of the intended recipients of the email message. The prompt 125 on the email user interface 102 may include appropriate recommendations, warnings, etc. The user 101 can select the relevant/irrelevant addressees and amend the email message appropriately or the user 101 can choose to disregard the prompt 125.
The agent 120 can be provided as part of the email client application 103. Alternatively, the agent 120 can be provided as a service provided over a network from a server.
An email user 101 can configure the agent 120 to provide the desired prompts 125 tailored to the user's requirements. This configuration of the agent 120 can include a complete disablement of the agent 120.
The agent 120 uses an algorithm to review the list of intended recipients. The algorithm is based on correct group data. The correct group data may be determined by any one or more of the following: predefined organizational groups, the groups defined by the user in his email application 103, and/or groups previously used by the user.
Predefined organizational groups can be provided by an organizational chart 122 which may be provided on an organization's server system 112. The server system 112 on which the organization chart resides may be the same or different to the server system 110 of the email server application 112.
A user can define groups of recipients in his email client application 103. These defined groups can be used as correct groupings by the agent 120.
Community or group information can also be gathered from previous messages in one or more user's client email application 103. A group monitor 124 determines groups or communities based on previous email correspondence of the user 101. A data structure 126 holds a ranking of groups within which a user corresponds based on previous email correspondence. Each group includes meta-data such as a graph representing the internal relationships, the number of messages sent to it, and dates of correspondence. Based on this meta-data, the rank of the group is determined. The data structure is persistently stored either locally to the client system 104, remotely on a server system 110, 112, or duplicated across a client/server system.
Referring to
The memory elements may include system memory 202 in the form of read only memory (ROM) 204 and random access memory (RAM) 205. A basic input/output system (BIOS) 206 may be stored in ROM 204. System software 207 may be stored in RAM 205 including operating system software 208. Software applications 210 may also be stored in RAM 205.
The system 200 may also include a primary storage means 211 such as a magnetic hard disk drive and secondary storage means 212 such as a magnetic disc drive and an optical disc drive. The drives and their associated computer-readable media provide non-volatile storage of computer-executable instructions, data structures, program modules and other data for the system 200. Software applications may be stored on the primary and secondary storage means 211, 212 as well as the system memory 202.
The computing system 200 may operate in a networked environment using logical connections to one or more remote computers via a network adapter 216.
Input/output devices 213 can be coupled to the system either directly or through intervening I/O controllers. A user may enter commands and information into the system 200 through input devices such as a keyboard, pointing device, or other input devices (for example, microphone, joy stick, game pad, satellite dish, scanner, or the like). Output devices may include speakers, printers, etc. A display device 214 is also connected to system bus 203 via an interface, such as video adapter 215.
The agent 120 uses correct group data to review a list of intended recipients. Correct group data is provided by different sources and provides reliable information on members belonging to recognised groups.
Correct group data may be provided by an organization data structure defined for an organization. Such a data structure 122 may be provided on a server system 112 and accessed by the agent 120 of the email client application 103 via the network 105. The organization data structure may be defined in many different ways but generally takes the form of a hierarchical data structure with members of the organization ordered in the hierarchy. Organization data structures may be defined for any form of organization and the user may have access to more than one organization data structure if he belongs to more than one organization, for example, his employer, professional body, committees, etc.
As examples, two forms of organization data structures are shown in
In
In any form of organization data structure, groups can be retrieved by common elements, such as location, department, position or ranking, etc. Members of a group having one or more common elements are extracted from the data structure. For example, regional managers in United States, or trainees in the state of California, or legal department members across the organization, etc.
The data structure defines a Boolean value for each pair of an individual and a group. This value indicates whether the individual is likely to send a message to the group. Groups are defined within the data structure for each recognisable set or sub-set of the structure.
Boolean values are given in a matrix M that includes rows for all employees and columns for all groups whose size is larger than a threshold t. Each cell has a value of 1 if the employee is likely to send to the group, 0 otherwise. The values may be set by a system administrator or by a set of rules. The rules may be set according to organization data structure parameters. When employee x sends to group g whose size is larger than t, the value of M[x][g] is considered. If it is 0, an appropriate warning is issued.
For example, a rule may say that each employee is likely to send to the smallest group she belongs to. The rules should also take into account the level of the employee in the organization data structure hierarchy. Normally, the higher the level is, the larger the groups the employee is likely to send to.
Correct group data may also be provided in an email client application 103 in which a user has defined correct group members under a group heading. For example, members of a football squad that meet regularly may all be defined in a user's email client application under the heading “Football”.
Correct group data may also be provided by mining an email client application 103 for group information. This is referred to as the user's social network. The group monitor 124 shown in
This procedure can also be applied centrally to multiple email client applications to determine group information mined from users across an organization. Such correct group data may be stored centrally on a server and accessed by each email client application via a network.
The groups in the list are ranked according to their strength. A strength of the groups is determined by the number of messages sent to its members, the dates of these messages, and the number of members in the group.
Two examples of how a ranked list of the groups can be achieved are described.
In one embodiment, the messages in one or more mailboxes are reviewed. Each message defines a group which is a set of the following: the sender of the message, the recipients in the “to” list, recipients in the “cc” list and the recipients in the “bcc”. The mailbox owner is not removed from this set to provide a group the mailbox owner would send to.
Each message adds a unit to the score of the group it defines. After reviewing all messages, a list of groups is formed where the score of each group is the number of messages sent to it. Sorting the list by score in descending order gives the desired ranked list of groups. Some adjustments can be made to the score each message gives to its group by taking the date of the message into account, i.e. messages with a more recent date will give higher score to their group.
In a second embodiment, a method is based on a graph built based on the headers of messages in one or more mailboxes. This graph is then partitioned into groups. Details can be found in the following paper: http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/idl/papers/email/index.html. The paper describes automatic identification of communities from email logs within an organization. An algorithm is used that finds communities within a graph representing information flows.
A method is described in the referenced paper in which vertices represent people (senders and recipients of email messages) and edges are added between people who correspond. Subsets of vertices with many edges connecting vertices of the same subset and few edges lying between subsets define community structure. Inter-community edges of highest betweeness are identified and removed leaving the defined communities. The groups detected by the algorithm can be ranked by the total weight of the corresponding edges in the graph.
Using either of the embodiments, the conclusion of the process is a ranked list of the mailbox's or mailboxes' groups. This list can be stored in a persistent location on an individual client system or on a server. Upon sending a message to a group, a group correction or group completion can be achieved by using the groups in the ranked list.
The intended group is compared to the list of popular groups with which the sender corresponds. If the group to which the email is proposed to be sent differs by one person, then an appropriate suggestion (to either add or change an addressee) is issued.
Referring to
If there is more than one intended recipient 405, the intended recipients are compared 406 with defined correct groups. The defined correct groups may be retrieved from an organization data structure, may be defined by the user in the email client application, or may be retrieved from a ranked list of groups mined from the user's mailbox.
It is determined 407 if there are any anomalies between the intended recipients and the defined correct groups. If there are no anomalies 408, then no action is taken 409 by the agent. If there is one or more anomaly 410, then a relevant prompt is generated 411 and an action suggested 412. A suggested action may be to replace, add or omit a recipient.
The following are example categories of occurrences or anomalies that may be monitored by the agent 120 as a user creates an email message with more than one intended recipient, instigating a prompt by the agent 120.
1. A user sending an email message to a predefined group, which is highly unlikely according to the organizational chart or involves special risks.
An example of this would be that if a director sends a message to all employees, no warning will be issued, but when a regular employee does so, an appropriate warning window will pop up. Some of the mistakes of this kind are caused by inadvertently using the “reply all” option rather than the “reply”.
Another example would be when a user belongs to a group with a similar name to another group. For example, if a member of the “Information Services” group types by mistake “Information Retrieval”, an appropriate warning will be issued. This will be done in spite of the fact that the typed group is a correct name of a predefined group, but according to the organizational information the group is unlikely to be correct.
2. Group correction.
This category includes correcting a specific address in a group which is highly unlikely to be included. For example, an email message may be created to be sent relating to a particular project to the project members. A mistake to include “Beth Brown” instead of “Beth Brownholtz” may be identified as the project members form a group which is regularly used by the user. According to the user's social communities and possibly the syntactic similarity between the addresses, a correction will be suggested.
Syntactic similarity occurs, for example, when two addresses in the organization differ by one character or when both have the same prefix. (For example, beth_brown/us/company and beth_brownholtz/uk/company, or john_smith/almaden/company & john_smith/haifa/company).
Similarity scores can be computed of the username to other usernames and a threshold set for deciding that the name sufficiently similar to raise a warning. The similarity score can be based on text similarity techniques, but should take into account both edit distance (how many characters need to be replaced to get from one string to another) and prefixes, as mentioned above.
Similarly, the mistake may be identified if all the intended recipients belong to an organization's department with the exception of one incorrect member.
The category also includes adding a specific address that is normally included in a group.
For example, when creating an email message from a previous message and not using the “reply all” option, users tend to forget to include the sender of the original message in the list of recipients. This can occur by the user copying just the “to” list and the “cc” list and forgetting to include the original sender. Based on the user's social communities, a suggestion to include a certain individual will be prompted in case the group is missing one of its regular members.
In another example, inclusion of certain individuals may be inferred by the inclusion of others. An individual X may be copied on all correspondences with an individual Y. Based on previous correspondence, in which individual Y is always copied correspondence to individual X, an appropriate suggestion will be made.
3. Group completion.
When typing a list of individual addresses, a completion will be offered to the user upon request of the most likely possibilities to complete the group according to the user's social network. The rank of the possibilities can include parameters such as the total amount of communication with the group, the size of the group, the communication in the last week/month, etc.
Similarly, the most likely possibilities to complete a group can be determined according to the user defined groups, or according to groups of an organizational data structure.
4. Automatic conversion of addresses to the “bcc” list.
When sending an email message to a large number of individual addresses, the prompt may suggest an automatic move of the addresses from the “to” list to the “bcc” list with the “to” list remaining empty, or containing the sender's own address, or just a dummy address. This should be done both for security reasons, to prevent email addresses being explicitly distributed among many users, and for privacy reasons. The “bcc” (blind carbon copy) list sends a message to the listed recipients in a way that the message they receive does not contain a complete list of recipients.
All of the above can be carried in an off-line or on-line mode.
The following is an example pseudo code upon user x sending to group g:
If g is a predefined organizational group and M[x][g]=0
For each group g′ in the top ranked list of groups with which the user corresponds
If g is similar to g′ (i.e. misses one contact or has one different contact than)
If g includes more than t′ (where t′ is a certain threshold) separate addresses
Group completion is done based on an explicit user request and thus is not included in this example pseudo code. The pseudo code may be extended to include checking for similarity of groups with the predefined organizational groups and/or the predefined user groups:
For each predefined organizational group g″, or predefined user group g′″
If g is similar to g″ or g′″ (i.e. misses one contact or has one different contact than)
The method of
A combination of one or more of the above methods can be applied to a message. For example, if a group is corrected according to
Referring to
In
In
In
The method of providing a prompt to correct or complete intended recipients or to transfer recipients to a bcc list may be provided as a service to a customer over a network.
The invention can take the form of an entirely hardware embodiment, an entirely software embodiment or an embodiment containing both hardware and software elements. In a preferred embodiment, the invention is implemented in software, which includes but is not limited to firmware, resident software, microcode, etc.
The invention can take the form of a computer program product accessible from a computer-usable or computer-readable medium providing program code for use by or in connection with a computer or any instruction execution system. For the purposes of this description, a computer usable or computer readable medium can be any apparatus that can contain, store, communicate, propagate, or transport the program for use by or in connection with the instruction execution system, apparatus or device.
The medium can be an electronic, magnetic, optical, electromagnetic, infrared, or semiconductor system (or apparatus or device) or a propagation medium. Examples of a computer-readable medium include a semiconductor or solid state memory, magnetic tape, a removable computer diskette, a random access memory (RAM), a read only memory (ROM), a rigid magnetic disk and an optical disk. Current examples of optical disks include compact disk read only memory (CD-ROM), compact disk read/write (CD-R/W), and DVD.
Improvements and modifications can be made to the foregoing without departing from the scope of the present invention.
