Enterprise Email Classification Based on Social Network Features

Abstract

With the popularity of multimedia and network technologies, it is now often to attach large size of multimedia dataset to emails. However, delivering large volume of multimedia data over an enterprise email system can easily bring down the quality of overall network service. Moreover, without some sort of restrictions, many enterprises found that the network resource was occupied for personal interests. The business communication over emails thus suffers undesirable delays and cause damages to businesses. The competition to use email service therefore become an issue that many enterprises have to deal with. Obviously, enterprises should manage the email service so that business emails have the priority over personal usages. This management requires an effective methodology to classify enterprise emails into official and private emails, and the development of the method is the goal of this work. To achieve the accuracy of a desired classification methodology, we normally anticipated the developed method to survey as much information as possible. On the other hand, monitoring details of the email contents not only can decrease the performance of the method, but it also may violate the privacy rights that many legal regulation systems now protect. The balance of pursuing accurate classification and protecting privacy rights becomes a challenge for this problem. With the discussed challenges in mind, we develop an email classification method based on social features, rather than surveying the email contents. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first study to address the aforementioned problems. We obtain social features from emails to represent the input vector of support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Preliminary results show that our methodology can classify emails with a high accuracy. Compared with the other content-based feature of email, our work shows that exploring social features is a promising direction to solve similar email classification problems.