Text-Mining Your E-mail

Misha writes "There have been a number of weeks/months in anyone's life that called for a better organization of your Inbox. filtering and folders work, but it'd be nice to have an text-mining tool running in the background that categorized incoming messages by topic as they arrive. It's nice to see that besides NLP research, there are some great algorithmic advances being done, as seen in this paper. Perhaps even one of them Perl monkeys will quickly hack such a background tool." Note: it's a PostScript file.

What I want

[clion999]

Here's to the researchers. I would like:

* An email box that lets me extract the threads with my friends.
* An email box that automatically ages the files effectively archiving them. Some of my mail folders/files are huge now and it takes too long to append them when new mail arrives.

Yes, I realize I should get off my butt and do this, but it's faster to post on slashdot.

Too much information.

[abucior]

Personally, I'd prefer that I simply get less email. The fact that we need NLP tools to pre-screen our email for us just shows how information-overloaded our society has become. What I really need is a tool at the sender's end that can pre-screen my email and tell the sender "Don't send this. He just doesn't care!"

look

[Joe the Lesser]

Now we all now that most email is delivered promptly by gremlins, but gremlins are hungry and will eat a few bytes here and there.

They also leave waste in the form of spam.

So, I propose that we turn to gnomes to deliver the mail instead, as they are much cleaner, and can be satiated by attaching a file like 'Hamburger.txt'.

One use to rule them all

[Col. Panic]

my $pr0n = "adult";
my $spam = "viagra";
my $urgent = "penis enlargement";
open (INBOX,/home/mail) or die "Damn! No fun for me:$!\n";
@list = readdir(INBOX);

foreach $ (@list) {
if (-f $spam) {
my $status = unlink($spam);
}
if (-f $pr0n) {
my @MUST_SEE = $pr0n;
next;
}
if (-f $viagra) {
my @RAINY_DAY = $viagra;
next;
}
}
# or something like that ...

Re:Link to a postscript file?

[SuiteSisterMary]

why not just bundle a damn interpreter with the OS and have a minimal frontend on it for screen viewing?

Gee, wouldn't that be illegally using their monopoly to muscle out third party developers? Why, if the OS had a PS viewer built in, nobody would every buy one! Businesses would go bankrupt!

Finally...

[Aiku1337]

Now I can automatically filter my barely-legal porn spam from my anime porn spam. Lets hear it for technology =)

Dilbertesque Apps

[Ezubaric]

If this works, you could modify the sorting so that e-mails from your higher-ups would get prompt replies even while you're trolling on /.

Boss emails:

1) What's the status of your project?
I just pulled my third all-nighter, sir, but we're always making progress. I would say we're int(date.day()/32*rand(1))% done right now. Go team!

2) We have a meeting at (time) about (topic).
Hey - I just got your e-mail. I was on the VP's (topic) steering board last year, so I'm really interested, but I have a conference call at (time)+(0:30), so I'm afraid I can't make it. Could you please send me the minutes if you get a chance, though?

3) Everything else
I have pictures. You know of what. Never e-mail me again or they're going to your mother and your spouse.

wtf??!!

[Anonymous Coward]

who the hell gets so much email they need to
mine for text, christ ??!! dont change your email filtering, change your pathetic life !!
there are plenty of other things far more worth mining than TEXT