This dataset was collected and prepared by the CALO Project (A
Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). It contains data
from about 150 users, mostly senior management of Enron,
organized into folders. The corpus contains
a total of about 0.5M messages.
This data was originally made
public, and posted to the web, by the Federal Energy Regulatory
Commission during its investigation.
The email dataset was later purchased by Leslie
Kaelbling at MIT, and turned out to have a number of integrity
problems. A number of folks at SRI, notably Melinda Gervasio,
worked hard to correct these problems, and it is thanks to them
(not me) that the dataset is available. The dataset here does not
include attachments, and some messages have been deleted "as part
of a redaction effort due to requests from affected
employees". Invalid email addresses were converted to something of
the form [email protected] whenever possible (i.e., recipient is
specified in some parse-able format like "Doe, John" or "Mary
K. Smith") and to [email protected] when no recipient was
specified.
I get a number of questions about this corpus each week, which
I am unable to answer, mostly because they deal with preparation
issues and such that I just don't know about. If you ask me a
question and I don't answer, please don't feel slighted.
I am distributing this dataset as a resource for researchers
who are interested in improving current email tools, or
understanding how email is currently used. This data is valuable;
to my knowledge it is the only substantial collection of "real"
email that is public. The reason other datasets are not public is
because of privacy concerns. In using this dataset, please be
sensitive to the privacy of the people involved (and remember that
many of these people were certainly not involved in any of the
actions which precipitated the investigation.)
Prior versions of the dataset are no longer
being distributed. If you are using the
March 2, 2004 Version; the August 21, 2009 Version;
or the April 2, 2011 Version of this dataset for
your work, you are requested to replace it with the newer
version of the dataset below, or make
the the appropriate changes to
your local copy.
There are also several on-line databases that allow you to
search the data, at
UCB, and
www.enron-mail.com
Research uses of the dataset
This is a partial and poorly maintained list. If I've left your
work out, don't take it personally, and feel free to send me a
pointer and/or description.
Kimmie Farrington and colleagues published a paper in 2011
that uses the Enron dataset as part of the test corpus for their
work on crowdsourcing human vs. computer generated
classification explanation: see Hutton, Amanda, Alexander Liu,
and Cheryl Martin. "Crowdsourcing evaluations of classifier
interpretability." In Proceedings of the 2012 AAAI Spring
Symposium on Wisdom of the Crowd
