TWIMC: An anonymous recipient e-mail system

Abstract

More and more people rely on e-mails rather than postal letters to communicate each other. Although e-mails are more convenient, letters still have many nice features. The ability to handle “anonymous recipient” is one of them. This research aims to develop a software agent that performs the routing task as human beings for the anonymous recipient e-mails. The software agent named “TWIMC (To Whom It May Concern)” receives anonymous recipient e-mails, analyze it, and then routes the e-mail to the mostly qualified person (i.e., e-mail account) inside the organization. The machine learning and automatic text categorization (ATC) techniques are applied for the task. We view each e-mail account as a category (or class) of ATC. Everyday e-mail collections for each e-mail account provide an excellent source of training data. The experiment shows the high possibility that TWIMC could be deployed in the real world.