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The 2004 Conference on Email and Anti-Spam was held in Mountain View California, July 30 and 31. 180 people attended to hear 29 papers. There were about 81 submissions. For information about future conferences, go to www.ceas.cc

Overview of the 2004 Conference

Email has grown from a tool used by a few academics on the Arpanet to a ubiquitous communications tool. It has evolved from a piece of simple, plain text in an inbox into a rich graphical medium that can be viewed, sorted, signed, encrypted, shared, archived, searched, prioritized, etc. Spam, following the growth of email, has changed from a minor curiosity, to a nuisance, to a multi-billion dollar problem.

There have been numerous industrial conferences on spam and email, which have typically concentrated on shipping products and very practical concerns. But there is also a need for academic-style conferences: peer-reviewed, with a published proceedings, and, most importantly, focused on the kind of carefully done, thorough, long-term research that the academic and industrial research communities need.

Of course, many academic papers have been published about spam and email, in fields as diverse as machine learning, cryptography, natural language processing, systems, security, and human computer-interaction. But there has been no single conference to bring together these communities to exchange ideas and compare techniques.

Email and spam are applied problems, with both legal and practical aspects. Another goal of this conference is to create a dialogue that includes the legal, policy, industrial and research communities.

Finally, email and email-spam have much in common with other fields, like instant messaging (and instant messaging spam), usenet (and usenet spam), etc. Solutions across these fields can be shared.

Papers presented at this conference were subjected to rigorous peer review. Three or more Program Committee members reviewed each paper. The assignment of Program Committee members to papers was based on their expertise with an eye to coverage of the relevant aspects of each paper. We used these reviews and subsequent discussion among reviewers to decide which papers to include in the conference. We received 81 papers of which 29 were accepted. In addition to the presentation of technical papers, we were pleased to have two distinguished invited speakers: Lawrence Lessig (Professor of Law and John A. Wilson Distinguished Faculty Scholar, Stanford University) and Hal Varian (Class of 1944 Professor at the School of Information Management and Systems, the Haas School of Business, and the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley).

We intend this conference to be the first in an annual series, although one day, when spam is eliminated, the name will change to simply "The Conference on Email". Come help us make that day come soon.

General Conference Chair:
David Heckerman (Microsoft Research)

Program Co-Chairs:
Tom Berson (Anagram Laboratories)
Joshua Goodman (Microsoft Research)
Andrew Ng (Stanford University)




Copyright © 2004 by CEAS
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Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 0-9749121-0-7