Mobile mail-agents through similarity-based reasoning.

Bots, or software agents are programs designed to perform tasks autonomously. Mailbots attempt to provide useful functions about electronic mail (E-mail) service such as filtering information, gathering information, and scheduling. With Internet use continuing to explode, the information overload is growing so fast that the same virtues that made E-mail so popular are now becoming a negative technologic ‘‘boomerang’’ (see the volume of junk or spam mail). Industrial as well as academic research has faced this problem in terms of automated filtering methods in order to distinguish legtimate E-mail from spamming. Here we describe an alternative approach: our mailbot is skilled to find ‘‘appropriate’’ destination of the message triggering a spidering process on an Intranetbased network. The spidering performs a distributed, mobile computation via pervasive agents: by applying a similarity-based reasoning on designed users resources the agents are able to deduct if the contacted user may be interested or not in receiving the E-mail. The overall architecture is implemented in Java using the basic issues of Internet protocol