A Program To Manage Email Overload

As a way to help solve the problem of email overload many of us face on a daily basis, Hilary Mason, a data scientist at Bitly, has written a program code to automatically sort her Gmail e-mails by importance. The E-Mail Classifier follows a series of rules which determine the priority order of the e-mails on a constant basis. So what are the parameters that the E-Mail Classifier looks for while sorting the mails? The New York Times explains:

The E-mail Classifier determines if you have e-mailed with Ms. Mason before. If you have, your message is pushed higher up a queue of other new messages. If you both correspond on a regular basis, you travel higher still. “The sender and subject line are actually the most important parts of an e-mail because people tend to put more important information in the subject,” Mason explained. “I’ve trained my classifier to understand this and try to determine the best action.” Then there is a list of people who are essentially given carte blanche to appear at the top of her inbox regardless of the time of day or content of their messages.

Apart from the above, the program also uses semantic analysis of the mail’s language when ranking e-mails. Much like other smart software, the E-Mail Classifier also learns as more messages come into the inbox.

Hilary Mason

NY Times: “Reinventing E-Mail, One Message at a Time”

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