E-mail Prioritization through Social Network Analysis

Abstract: Context. Trust and reliability are important issues in online communication. By rapid growth of online social networks (OSNs), online communication becomes richer by the integrating of social interaction into the communication model. However, E-mail communication systems concern about unsolicited messages. Objectives. In this thesis the aim is to investigate how to prioritize E-mails between recipients and senders by using information from OSNs. Methods. An algorithm is presented for computing trust by measuring users‟ interaction and similarity in online social networks and this trust is used by another algorithm for prioritizing the E-mail inbox. Results. An evaluation of the proposed method is performed via a case study and the prediction error of the method is compared with the prediction error of the random feedback. The error of the method is significantly lower than random feedback and is relatively low, given the small number of observations. Conclusions. This thesis contributes in its review and categorization of existing trust models. Furthermore, it provides an analysis on how to use social information for E-mail prioritization. Based on the analysis, a method is presented for improving the reliability of E-mail communication by extracting information from OSNs. The information is used for computing the trust score between two OSN friends. In this thesis, it is suggested that, inbox prioritization is achievable using the selected method.