Advertising messages compete for scarce attention. “Junk” mail, “spam” e-mail, and telemarketing calls need both parties to exert effort to generate transactions. Message recipients supply attention depending on average message beneÞt. Senders are motivated by proÞts. Costlier message transmission may improve message quality so more messages are examined. Too many messages may be sent, or the w...

Although electronic mail is an increasingly important service, there are few empirical studies of e-mail traffic. We have observed over 2.85 million messages passing through our departmental servers over the course of seven months, and derived distributions that approximate several important e-mail parameters including message sizes, message senders and receivers and the burstiness of message d...

Due to e-mail's ubiquitous nature, millions of users are intimate with the technology; however, most users are only familiar with managing their own e-mail, which is an inherently different task from exploring an e-mail archive. Historians and social scientists believe that e-mail archives are important artifacts for understanding the individuals and communities they represent. To understand th...

Electronic mail has been fully integrated into the communication processes in this country. Within the business environment, e-mail allows managers to efficiently communicate not only with customers and venders, but also internally with subordinates, superiors and peers. Less hard copy and more digital copy is being used to share and disseminate knowledge. The dialogue between managers that pre...

The e-mail service is one of the most used network services: electronic mail messages can now easily be delivered in any place where a network connection exists. However, despite the current multi-media oriented spirit of the other popular services, most of the electronic mail traffic is still plain text. While the transport infrastructure is potentially in place, there is a strong need for coo...

We have traditionally viewed spam from the receiver’s point of view: mail servers assaulted by a barrage of spam from which we must pick out a handful of legitimate messages. In this paper we describe a system for better filtering spam by exploiting the vantage point of the spammer. By instantiating and monitoring botnet hosts in a controlled environment, we are able to monitor new spam as it i...

For many people, e-mail has become a running record of their business and personal lives. Somewhere in that big clot of e-mail messages that have accumulated over the years is a wealth of information about people they’ve met, work they’ve done, meetings they’ve held. There are tough calls and tender moments, great debates and funny episodes. When did you first meet a certain person? Just what w...

Patients want to be able to communicate with their physicians by e-mail. However, physicians are often concerned about the impact that such communications will have on their time, productivity, and reimbursement. Typically, physicians are not reimbursed for time spent communicating with patients electronically. But under federal meaningful-use criteria for information technology, physicians can...

This study compared the exchange of emotional content in PC and mobile e-mail in business-related discussions. Forty American business people were divided into two groups (PC and mobile e-mail users) and were then assigned to anonymous discussion pairs who exchanged a total of six messages on a predetermined topic. When a message was sent, the writers completed two questionnaires related to 12 ...

We show how a game-theoretic model of spam e-mailing, which we had introduced in previous work, can be extended to include the possibility of employing Human Interactive Proofs (hips) in conjunction with filters that classify incoming messages as legitimate or spam. Using our extended model, we show that making hips widely available to e-mail users will reduce the volume of spam on the Internet...