Email is an increasingly important and ubiquitous means of communication, both facilitating contact between private individuals and enabling rises in the productivity of organizations. However the relentless rise of automatic unauthorized emails, a.k.a. spam is eroding away much of the attractiveness of email communication. Most of the attention dedicated to date to spam detection has focused on the content of the emails or on the addresses or domains associated with spam senders. Although methods based on these - easily changeable - identifiers work reasonably well they miss on the fundamental nature of spam as an opportunistic relationship, very different from the normal mutual relations between senders and recipients of legitimate email. Here we present a comprehensive graph theoretical analysis of email traffic that captures these properties quantitatively. We identify several simple metrics that serve both to distinguish between spam and legitimate email and to provide a statistical basis for models of spam traffic.

Current search technologies work in a "one size fits all" fashion. Therefore, the answer to a query is independent of specific user information need. In this paper we describe a novel ranking technique for personalized search servicesthat combines content-based and community-based evidences. The community-based information is used in order to provide context for queries andis influenced by the current interaction of the user with the service. Ouralgorithm is evaluated using data derived from an actual service available on the Web an online bookstore. We show that the quality of content-based ranking strategies can be improved by the use of communityinformation as another evidential source of relevance. In our experiments the improvements reach up to 48% in terms of average precision.