On the recent use of email through traffic and network analysis: the impact of OSNs, new trends, and other communication platforms

Since the late 1971 -- when Ray Tomlinson invented Internetbased email and sent the first message on ARPANET -- email technology has evolved a lot, and nowadays it is one of the most widely used applications on the Internet. Despite this primacy, during the last years other ways to exchange messages have been used by Internet users (e.g. Instant Messaging, Social Networks, microblogs, etc.). In this paper we propose a methodology based on heterogeneous data sources to analyze the amount of traffic associated with emails in order to gain knowledge on the use of email by Internet users in the last years. We consider real traffic traces that are well known to the research community as well as locally captured, and discuss them in the light of other related phenomena: social networks adoption, online advertising trends, abusive email spreads, etc..We discuss the trend of email traffic in the last 10 years and we provide explanations related to the impact, on the email usage, of the utilization of other communication platforms. This work represents a first step towards a framework in which to analyze the trend of the email traffic and the associated phenomena as well as the understanding of the upcoming novel communications behavior of Internet users.

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