Building a Confident Advanced Email System Using a New Correspondence Model

Due to its ease of use combined with its efficiency, traditional email service constitutes one of the main success story brought by the Internet. Its popularity hides however significant gaps. Professional email systems usually remedy such deficiencies by compiling a lot of sophisticated features in a single monolithic policy which should ideally take into account security requirements together with various other specific needs. The main drawback of these approaches lies in their inherent rigidity. They indeed grant no place for the concepts of usage and context which are fundamental for any modern communication service. The usage is determined by a user's intention of communication: private, professional, administrative, official, military. Context is clearly orthogonal to usage because a same usage may require different features depending of the context. We propose to define a correspondence model which for a given usage and context allows to dynamically derive a correspondence type encapsulating the exact set of required features. With this model, it becomes possible to define an advanced email system which may dynamically cope with multiple policies instead of a single monolithic one. By allowing a user to select the exact policy matching her needs, we argue that our approach reduces her risk-taking, providing in this way a confident advanced email system.