Messages e-mailed by robots account for 90 percent of current daily traffic in Russia, squeezing out those written by real people, which stood at 65 percent of the total in 2000 and is now down to 10 percent, experts said at a Yandex news conference on Thursday.
Out of 138 million messages that go through Yandex mail servers daily, only 14 million are typed by people. The rest are sent automatically by news services (48 million), social networks (27 million), Internet shops (1 million), airline reservation systems (0.2 million) and others.
While e-mail content continues to change, there has not been any major improvement in software that is designed to process these e-mails. Apart from filtering, forwarding and weeding for spam, there has been little advancement to help people manage their messages.
This week Yandex added new functionality to its free webmail service, used by 40 percent of local Internet users, to display e-mail content differently, depending on its type.
The new technology, which is called Marker, is able to identify 15 types of correspondence, including private correspondence, notifications from social networks and Internet stores, electronic tickets, mailings about discounts, and offer the recipient appropriate tools to work with it. It is a self-learning mechanism based on MatrixNet, a fact extraction technology for retrieving key information from text.
"People normally take note of an important message or carry out some kind of action — print out an electronic ticket, or record a booking number. Our new concept is to give people tools that will allow them to quickly perform these tasks directly within Yandex.mail," Anton Zabannykh, head of personal communication services at Yandex, said Thursday.
For example, the system is capable of recognizing a flight reservation message. As well as displaying the actual content of the message, the new service is capable of creating a calendar entry with SMS alerts without exiting the mail program. Yandex said its solution would automatically push the message to the top of the page a day before the flight, and include links for online registration.
Contact the author at [email protected]
A Message from The Moscow Times:
Dear readers,
We are facing unprecedented challenges. Russia's Prosecutor General's Office has designated The Moscow Times as an "undesirable" organization, criminalizing our work and putting our staff at risk of prosecution. This follows our earlier unjust labeling as a "foreign agent."
These actions are direct attempts to silence independent journalism in Russia. The authorities claim our work "discredits the decisions of the Russian leadership." We see things differently: we strive to provide accurate, unbiased reporting on Russia.
We, the journalists of The Moscow Times, refuse to be silenced. But to continue our work, we need your help.
Your support, no matter how small, makes a world of difference. If you can, please support us monthly starting from just $2. It's quick to set up, and every contribution makes a significant impact.
By supporting The Moscow Times, you're defending open, independent journalism in the face of repression. Thank you for standing with us.
Remind me later.
