Yandex.Mail Introduces New Approach to Email

Internet, June 27, 2013. Yandex.Mail now automatically sorts personal emails. In addition to sending and delivering messages, Yandex’s online email service helps its users complete all kinds of tasks – from planning meetings to registering for flights. Depending on the type of correspondence, the service chooses different options to offer users.

“It’s clear that email is no longer just a means of interpersonal communication,” said Anton Zabannykh, head of personal communication services at Yandex. “Correspondence between individuals now accounts for just 10% of email flows. The remainder consists of mailouts and automated notifications. People usually either simply take note of them or carry out some kind of action ¬– print out an electronic ticket, or record a booking number. Our new concept is to give people tools that will allow them to quickly perform these tasks – directly within Yandex.Mail.”

In order to respond differently to different kinds of emails, Yandex developed and introduced a new technology – Marker. It is able to determine the type of correspondence and offer the recipient appropriate tools for working with it. This technology can identify about 15 types of email – private correspondence, notifications from social networks and internet stores, electronic tickets, mailouts about discounts, and so on. It utilises capabilities of Yandex’s stellar machine learning method, MatrixNet, and uses a fact extraction technology for retrieving information from text.

Yandex.Mail currently uses the new technology to process three types of correspondence – electronic air tickets, invitations to meetings, and messages about discounts. The recipient of an airplane ticket no longer has to remember the exact flight details: if they so wish, Yandex.Mail can give a timely reminder about the flight, offer online registration and provide weather updates for the destination. A user receiving a dinner invitation can ask Yandex.Mail to make sure they don’t forget about it. The service will gradually be adding other types of correspondence to the range of emails it can recognise and organise.

Yandex.Mail helps users to perform tasks not only when reading emails, but when writing them as well. To make it easier for people to make arrangements, such as picking the time and place for a meeting, Yandex.Mail will soon be introducing “Live Letters” – a web-based service that allows multiple users to write and edit messages together in real time.

Contact:
Media Relations
Vladimir Isaev, Ochir Mandzhikov
Phone: +7 495 739-7000
E-mail: pr@yandex-team.com