A Personal Email Assistant
Ruth Bergman, Martin Griss, Carl Staelin · 2002
A key element of the CoolAgent Personal Assistant vision is the active managementand use of personal, team and organizational information. The finding, filtering, composing, routing and information-triggered notification to a (mobile) user, adapted to the location, schedule, available appliances, tasks and other personal and team context is a key capability within the vision of an agent-based system for personal, professional and team activities. In this paper we report on the current status of a key element, the personal email assistant (PEA), which provides a customizable, machine learning-based environment to support the activities of a major time sink of our daily lives -- the processing of email. The system has been designed to be usable either with or without an agent-based infrastructure, and to be useful with a variety of email systems. In its current form, it leverages and augments the cabilities provided by Exchange and Outlook. It provides capabilities of: smart vacation responder, junk mail filter, efficient email indexing and searching, deleting, forwarding, re-filing, and prioritizing of email. A key contribution of our work has been to leverage high-quality open source components for information retrieval, machine learning, agents and rules to provide a powerful, flexible and robust capability.