Design and Implementation of a Mail Distribution System Using Reasoning Mechanism for Dynamic Group Construction

Abstract

Recently, electronic mail has been widely used for a variety of purposes, such as cooperative works, advertisement, and informal communication. In order to support such communication forms, the conventional mailing-list systems cannot offer flexibility in management of group members, such as addition, update, and deletion of members. Furthermore, even if we employ another approach where user information is managed for each individual and groups are constructed dynamically according to the specification of destination address condition, all information must be described in a predefined format, which prevents us from flexibly describing the way of information distribution. In this paper, we propose a method for dynamically constructing groups using a reasoning mechanism and discuss the design and implementation of MILD (MaIL Distribution) system, which is based on the proposing group construction method. In MILD, we can describe various information regarding, e.g., individuals, business, and hobbies, and such information can be intuitively integrated without explicitly specifying how to integrate them. Furthermore, providing the description capability of operations on the results of reasoning, various destination addresses can be specified by combining these operations. As a result, we show that MILD is flexible enough for both on the user information management and on the specification of conditions.