Facemail: showing faces of recipients to prevent misdirected email

Users occasionally send email to the wrong recipients -- clicking Reply To All instead of Reply, mistyping an email address, or guessing an email address and getting it wrong - and suffer violations of security or privacy as a result. Facemail is an extension to a webmail system that aims to alleviate this problem by automatically displaying pictures of the selected recipients in a peripheral display, while the user is composing an email message. We describe techniques for obtaining faces from email addresses, and discovering mailing list memberships from existing web data sources, and a user interface design that keeps important faces recognizable while scaling up to hundreds or thousands of recipients. Preliminary experiments suggest that faces significantly improve users' ability to detect misdirected emails with only a brief glance.