So says the Wall Street Journal. Lots of interesting info about how major providers are now looking at email:
"One experimental Yahoo service known internally as "Friend Finder"
analyzes a user’s email traffic and indicates the friends with whom a
user has strong email connections. It bases its findings on the volume
of incoming and outgoing traffic and such factors as the frequency and
speed with which the two parties respond to each other. The service
works with emails sent by non-Yahoo users as well."
That’s something we’re very familiar with at ClearContext. We’ve spent the last few years optimizing our algorithms to determine which contacts are really important to you. We described much of our design philosophy and decisions in this whitepaper 3 years ago. Contact relationships mined from your email history are at the core of our IMS product for Outlook, which helps prioritize and organize not just email messages, but also tasks and appointments. But contact priority is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to information that can be learned from looking at the context and relationship of information stored within email. We’re currently beta testing the next version of IMS and are really excited about releasing it soon for everyone to see, as it will provide a glimpse into some of the really exciting possibilities from within email that have yet to be exposed.