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Focus: E-mail Classification
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Why is e-mail classification important?
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The rapidly increasing volume of e-mail in today’s business—both relevant correspondence and unsolicited messages—is creating new challenges that can’t be ignored. Rapidly increasing personnel and storage capacity costs are just part of the risk. Important messages that are mishandled—for example routed to folders where they will never be reviewed or even flat-out rejected by an overburdened server—can have serious business consequences. To address these new challenges, businesses must optimize storage usage as well as implement a reliable e-mail classification strategy. Automatic classification of e-mail based on defined criteria enables businesses to ensure messages are routed directly to designated workers for swift response and are properly handled at every stage in the e-mail lifecycle.
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How does automatic e-mail classification work?
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The automatic sorting of e-mail based on content is something most conventional e-mail management programs do not support. Such systems are limited to categorizing e-mail using a simple comparison process driven by manually-entered keywords used to detect names, sender addresses, receive-dates and subject lines. The sorting and handling of e-mail based on actual content must then follow as a manual process.
iQ.Suite takes a more comprehensive approach. With iQ.Suite, e-mails can be automatically assigned to one or more categories based on both keyword comparisons and on content. This categorization/classification is determined by customizable definitions in iQ.Suite’s rule-based policy engine, where businesses can not only define specialized rules that directly correspond to each business process, but also set up specialized categories. The rule-based policy engine, a unique feature built into all iQ.Suite modules, allows businesses to ensure that e-mail handling guidelines specified for individual business processes are always followed. iQ.Suite thus enables businesses to automatically classify and then automatically forward and/or otherwise process e-mail based on pre-defined policies specifying both address and content criteria.
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How does iQ.Suite implement e-mail classification?
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iQ.Suite’s e-mail classification capabilities leverage the CORE (COntent Recognition Engine) technology in iQ.Suite Wall. CORE is a statistical process for automatically reviewing and classifying e-mail based on Support Vector Machines (SVM), one of the most powerful text recognition algorithms in the industry. CORE, which analyzes the total content of an e-mail, including sender, recipient address, subject, message text and attachments, is useful not only for classifying, sorting and prioritizing incoming e-mails, but also for reviewing them for spam. And because CORE is individually trainable, it can be configured to detect and filter specific types of e-mail for each user—desirable and undesirable newsletters for example.
With CORE, e-mails can be automatically checked for spam, classified, delivered and/or otherwise processed, forwarded to designated recipients, and in the case of e-mails classified as sensitive, routed to a compliance management system. In this way, a support request sent to a central helpdesk address, for example, can be immediately forwarded to the most appropriate worker for the problem described in the e-mail. iQ.Suite’s content-based routing thus allows organizations to ensure that all business-relevant e-mails arrive swiftly in the appropriate mailboxes, and that any additional required measures for further processing are automatically initiated.
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What role does e-mail classification play in the processing of e-mails within business processes?
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E-mail classification plays a deciding role in the content-dependent processing of e-mail within business processes. It is an essential building block in E-mail Lifecycle Management, a strategy for automating the lifecycle of an e-mail from its reception to its archiving, and is useful in many diverse application areas. Examples are the automatic and context-based storage of e-mails based on content, the implementation of flexible delivery and distribution mechanisms, and the automatic indexing of e-mails in preparation for archiving.
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When does e-mail classification take place in the E-mail Lifecycle Management process flow?
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E-mail Lifecycle Management ensures the efficient processing of e-mail from initial entry into the organization through archiving and ultimate deletion. Electronic messages flow through various processing steps, achieving a value increase at every stage. After messages and attachments are decrypted and scanned for spam and viruses, messages judged to be business-relevant are classified, and according to their classification further processed, reviewed for compliance, archived and finally delivered.
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How can e-mail classification be used to reduce user workload?
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The automatic pre-sorting and content-oriented delivery of incoming e-mails to designated departments and employees—otherwise known as content-based routing—is now an achievable concept. The CORE technology built into iQ.Suite Wall allows e-mails to be automatically distributed to any desired recipient addresses based on pre-defined, customizable corporate defaults. E-mails can in addition be sent to appropriate project folders or transferred to applications like archiving, CRM, ERP, ECM and DMS systems. Users are freed from manual sorting activities and receive only the e-mails that are actually addressed to them.
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How does e-mail classification help improve customer service?
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Most customers using e-mail to request assistance from a business expect an answer within 12 to 24 hours. Failure to receive a response within this timeframe is a significant and frequent source of customer dissatisfaction. For most businesses today, e-mail is already the most important medium for handling customer inquiries. With this in mind, no customer expects to wait 2 or more days for a response.
E-mail classification helps organizations properly handle incoming e-mail faster. It can be used to classify messages based on content and automatically forward them to the appropriate workers. A support request would automatically be routed to the correct support staff worker, for example. It also makes it possible to prioritize e-mails based on importance and urgency, allowing users to evaluate and process requests faster within the context of what is best for the business. E-mail classification can thus help achieve considerably improved response speeds and better overall customer service.
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How can e-mail classification be leveraged for regulatory compliance and protection against industrial espionage?
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Violation of anti-trust and competition laws, regulatory guidelines like GDPdU, Basel II and IFRS and rules for corporate governance can result in costly legal procedures, fines and penalties into the millions, claims for third-party damages and considerable negative impact on corporate image. In some cases imprisonment threatens those responsible.
E-mail classification makes it possible to reliably and consistently separate the good from the bad and enforce corporate compliance policy—even in situations where e-mail volume is rapidly growing. Automated classification processes are perfect for preventing sensitive or compliance-relevant e-mails from proceeding to additional review and release steps until they are determined to be in fulfillment of policy. The same technique can be used for all e-mail, including messages that should be processed and stored in other business applications like CRM, ERP and ECM solutions.
Industrial espionage, often the act of an employee inside the business, is another problem on the rise. The use of text analysis and classification technology makes it possible to detect and intercept outgoing e-mails and attachments that contain sensitive content, allowing the organization to prevent the unauthorized dissemination of censored, undesirable or confidential business information as defined by corporate policy.
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How can e-mail classification be used to enhance the archiving process?
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Through automatic classification, e-mail can be stored in various logical archives based on content and origin. A (partially) automated keyword index generation process based on classification results also reduces user workload and helps maintain a standardized, normalized index of classification keywords. Users are thus freed from manual keyword creation and indexing efforts.
Automated, rule-based review and classification of e-mail also ensures that only messages having been classified as relevant to the business are sent into the archive. Exclusion of non-relevant e-mails from the archiving process—including spam and virus-infected e-mails—can considerably enhance server performance and reduce storage requirements.
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How can e-mails be automatically associated with project files in other applications?
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Much of the information found in any business lays around unsorted and unclassified on file systems, in e-mails files, or buried in CRMs or groupware applications. During the course of business, users must often manually search for and assemble the information they need “just in time.”
Because e-mail is the most frequent trigger for new processes, new possibilities for improving worker efficiency arise. For example, e-mail classification and content analysis make it possible to automatically link incoming e-mails with related information previously saved in other systems, thus making the task of accessing “just in time” information—no matter where it is stored—considerably easier. And because information in e-mails can be used to kick off automated actions, e-mail can start to be used as a type of data collector that empowers users with a new, more efficient work technology than exists in today’s business.
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