This document describes SNAIL, a plugin for Outlook that aims to improve email usage by making emails faster to find and frequently contacted people easier to identify. It does this by extracting metrics from emails, aggregating contacts, integrating social networks, and developing a sidebar interface. The plugin was tested and found to accurately determine important contacts and provide a new way to write and find emails by seamlessly integrating into Outlook. Areas for future work include evaluating additional sorting mechanisms, integrating social contacts into scoring, and connecting to a context framework via XML-RPC.

1. SNAIL – quick accesstoSocial Networks in EmAIL Final Presentation

2. The Problem

3. TooMany Emails Hard tosearchthrough Hard toprioritize

4. The Goals

5. Find Emails faster!

6. Find Emails faster! Develop Contactoriented Email Sorting

7. Find Emails faster! Develop Contactoriented Email Sorting

8. Take Social Networksinto Account

9. Find Emails Faster DistinguishImportantfromUnimportant Mails

14. Contact List

15. Thread ViewSoftware Development Steps

16. Concept Design

19. Datatypes

20. Events

22. Whatwewant

23. Sidebar Here

24. But!

25. How do We achieve This?

30. Pull Information from Mail Item Object

31. Sender

32. Recipient

33. Subject

36. Gettingthe Mails In Outlook Mails aresortedcontained in folders Eachconfiguredprofileis a folderandhas subsequent subfolders Iteration over all Folders necessary

38. Identify Folders andperformrecursiveiteration

40. MapsTo Contains Class Relations

41. Pullinginformation From Mailitem MailItemprovidesuswith Subject Recipient Sender ConversationID Allowsustotrackconversationsandaggregatethreads

42. Adding Outlook Contacts CorrelationofgeneratedContactswith Outlook Contacts Find existing Outlook Contactsand link themwithgeneratedContacts Create new Outlook ContactsfromgeneratedContacts Development Get all Outlook ContactItemobjects RetrieveEntryID Save EntryID

43. Connecting With Facebook Contactscan also befound on socialnetworks Development Facebook SDK pullsinformationfromyourfacebookuserprofile

44. Serialization Outlook Items can not beserialized! But insteadtheEntryIDcanbestored Retrieve Outlook Items fromEntryID InvokeGetItemFromID(stringEntryID) Store onlytheEntryIDofthe Outlook Item .NET Serializationtakescareofautomaticsaving & loadingofdata

45. SortingTechniques Concept 1: Order By Unreadyes/no Score = 1−Sent+0,00001Received+0,00001+0,1Sent+0,00001 The smallerthebetter Concept 2: Order By Unreadyes/no Last Message received / sent Sent Mails

46. Provide Property for Score calculation SortContactlistwith Lambda Expressions Sample Contacts = Contacts.OrderByDescending(x => x.UnreadMails).ThenBy(x => x.RatingsScore).ToList(); Developingit

47. Score samples

48. Evaluation Evaluation of Concepts yielded the following Results Concept 1 very efficient at finding organic contacts (contacts that are perceived as important) But does not take time into account, e.g. an old friend with tons of old emails can only slowly be topped by a new organic contact Concept 2 Not very efficient at finding organic contacts (irrelevant contacts can be on the top of the list, only due to lastmessage) Concept 1 is more efficient than Concept 2 (Relevance estimation is more accurate) A mixture of Concept 1 & Concept 2 is even more efficient Determine Score on the basis of all sent/received mails in a certain timespan

49. Outlook 2007 Plugin – Main Window

50. Outlook 2007 Plugin – Thread View

51. Conclusion & Test Results SNAIL has been able to improve email usage by making Emails faster to find Frequently contacted people easier to find Handle incoming mails by contact priority Showing Social graphing Connecting social networks to email Users testing SNAIL have said That the contact rating is surprisingly accurate That it provides an interesting new concept of writing & finding mails They like it because it integrates seamlessly into their existing Outlook Clients

52. Outlook Evaluation of alternative sortingmechanismsmaybedone, considering Takingsocialcontactsintoaccountwhencalculating score Manual biasingof score bytheuser (votesystem)

53. Graph Visualization Show Contactrelationshipswith an Interface UseNodeXLforVisualizationofSocialConnections UseConnectedContact Property as Data

54. Connectingto The context Framework

55. Tracks a user’s activities Gets informations from various sensors Is accessed via XML RPC The context Framework

57. Codeplex Microsoft‘sSourceforge (mostly .NET stuff) SNAIL ishosted on http://snail.codeplex.com/

59. Questions Anyone? Qiong Wu qiong.wu@studentpartners.de +49-152-29845748