SUBJECT: Re : email Hey &NAME , I guess you looked at the website right ? Making the corpus ( body of email data ) available to the academic community means just that ! The idea is that the anonymisation procedure removes any references to real people / places / organisations / locations etc. and then the corpus is used as a benchmark training and testing resource for academics doing research into the junk email classification problem . That means that they will use computers to generate statistical probabilities of certain words appearing at certain places in emails , and then use these to classify new emails as either genuine or junk . Having a corpus that multiple people test systems on is vital for reproducibility of experiments , etc. Do n't worry - noone as seen any of the emails you let me use . ( Obviously I did n't use any of the &NUM from &NAME , etc. anyway ! ) The idea of the website is to convince people that it is safe to use the emails they donated as part of this corpus because it will be impossible to tell where the emails came from , where they were sent to , who they were about , etc. etc. But this will only happen with explicit permission from the donor , and if you 're not happy about yours being used in that way , then that 's fine ! It 's still been really useful for me to use them thus far . Speak soon , &NAME &NAME Wed , &NUM May &NUM , &NAME &CHAR &NAME wrote : <QUOTE> &NAME , that was decidedly unclear . What do you mean about sending it to the academic community ? Feel free to use my e-mails for your project , but I am not sure I want other academics to read them . &NAME - -- &NAME &NAME ( &EMAIL ) wrote : ) Dear Email Donors , <QUOTE> When you get a chance , please could you have a look at the following website : &WEBSITE It discusses the procedure I am using to ' anonymise ' the emails you have donated . Please read to the bottom of the page , where there is a section on disseminating the corpus to the scientific community , to aid research in the area of email filtering and classification . Of course , the email you donated will only be used with your permission . Thanks - I really appreciate your help , &NAME <END_QUOTE> It 's &NAME ' Week . Help &NAME help others . Call &NUM &NUM to give or donate online now at &WEBSITE <END_QUOTE>