Introduction

Email addresses, like telephone numbers, are often hard to remember, and they change from time to time, making it difficult to send messages to the intended recipients. In some cases, we may not even know the identity of the recipients, as their roles and interests change. (For example, we may not know the identities of our current city council members or the department heads in our companies or the administrator in that government agency we want to reach.) Mailing lists, being made up of email addresses, become quickly out of date as email addresses change and as people modify their roles and interests.

Semantic Email Addressing (SEAMail) attacks these problems by making it possible for users to specify recipients based on data about the recipients rather than with traditional email addresses. It order to do this, Seamail draws upon data provided within organizational directories, governmental databases, friend-of-a-friend listings, and so forth.

In preliminary trials, SEAMail has been well received. We expect to deploy a fully operational version of the service in the Computer Science Department in Summer 2009 as part of Stanford's Digital Department project. It will then be broadened to the campus-wide Stanford Information Network by the end of the year.