Email Mining: Emerging New Business Application

There's a new application coming soon to a corporate email system near you. It's a logical extension, experts say, of the increased emphasis on the archiving and searching of email these days, driven by regulatory compliance and legal discovery. The latter have become cold, hard realities in today's corporate world.

This coming new application is called "email mining," because it's all about extracting knowledge from a company's rapidly expanding email stores, using specialized email archiving solutions.

With the ongoing explosion of unstructured data, companies are increasingly finding it necessary to mine various types of knowledge bases, both within and without their corporate walls. Call it what you will: knowledge mining, intelligence mining, or simply a variant of corporate search - it's a good bet for attention and focus in 2006 and beyond, for a number of reasons.

Email mining is one type of intelligence mining that companies are already starting to do inside their own firewall. Email remains the killer app in business communications, and is not expected to relinquish that lead anytime soon. A recent report published by IDC on the future of email talks about "the crucial role for email throughout the collaboration process." And it raises the possibility that email content may "parallel that of other enterprise application data and business processes."