An Online Content Based Email Attachments Retrieval System

Abstract

E-mail is one of the most popular programs used by most people today. As a result of the continuous daily use, thousands of messages are accumulated in the electronic box of most individuals, which make it difficult for them after a period of time to retrieve the attachments of these messages. Most Email providers constantly improved their search technology, but till now there is something could not be done; i.e., searching inside attachments. Some email providers like Gmail has added searching words inside attachments for some file types (.pdf files, .doc documents, .ppt presentations) but for image files this feature not supported till now. However, E-mail providers and even modern researches have not focused on retrieving the image attachments in the Email box. The paper was aimed to introduce a novel idea of using Content based Image Retrieval (CBIR) in E-mail application to retrieve images from email attachments based on entire contents. The work main phases are: feature extraction based on color features and connect to Email server to read Emails, the second phase is retrieving similar image attachments. The tests carried on mail inbox contain 100 messages with 500 image attachments and gave good precision and recall rates When the threshold value is less than or equal to 0.4.