You Will Get Mail!Predicting the Arrival of Future Email

The majority of Web email is known to be generated by machines even when one excludes spam. Many machine-generated email messages such as invoices or travel itineraries are critical to users. Recent research studies establish that causality relations between certain types of machine-generated email messages exist and can be mined. These relations exhibit a link between a given message to a past message that gave rise to its creation. For example, a shipment notification message can often be linked to a past online purchase message. Instead of studying how an incoming message can be linked to the past, we propose here to focus on predicting future email arrival as implied by causality relations. Such a prediction method has several potential applications, ranging from improved ad targeting in up sell scenarios to reducing false positives in spam detection. We introduce a novel approach for predicting which types of machine-generated email messages, represented by so-called “email templates”, a user should receive in future time windows. Our prediction approach relies on (1) statistically inferring causality relations between email templates, (2) building a generative model that explains the inbox of each user using those causality relations, and (3) combining those results to predict which email templates are likely to appear in future time frames. We present preliminary experimental results and some data insights obtained by analyzing several million inboxes of Yahoo Mail users, who voluntarily opted-in for such research.