MailCat: An intelligent assistant for organizing e-mail

Abstract

While most mail reader applications allow users to file messages into folders, in practice this task tends to be tedious. For each message, the user must first decide which folder is most appropriate. Then, the user must inform the mail reader of that choice by selecting the appropriate icon or menu item from among what is typically a set of several dozen choices. The combined effort of choosing a folder and conveying that choice to the application often discourages users from filing their mail, resulting in unmanageable in-boxes that contain hundreds or even thousands of unfiled messages. MailCat encourages users to file their mail by simplifying the task. Using an adaptive classifier, it predicts the three folders that are most likely to be appropriate for a given message, and provides shortcut buttons that permit the user to file it into a predicted folder effortlessly. For typical users, MailCat's predictions are accurate over 80% to 90% of the time, resulting in a substantial reduction in the time and cognitive burden required to file messages.