Our typical day to day conversations involve speaking face to face with one or two people. Other times we are speaking to a room full of people. And when remote communications are needed we reach for our cell phones or dial onto conference calls. If we wish to reach out to a larger audience, to people unknown to us, then there are always the communication mediums of newspaper ads, magazines, TV advertising and billboards. The modern day equivalents are blogging, YouTube and various social networking sites.

But with email, we are giving few communication parameters other than “To:”, “Cc:”, “Bcc:”, “Subject:” and the content we wish to send.

Today if you want to send an email to a large audience you have to maintain or pay for a small database of contact information. Some mass emailings use contact information that has been gathered, collated and packaged for the use of spammers and email phishers. But there are also legitimate uses for sending out mass emailings such as for political campaigns or email alerts. For example, you might want to reach out to all registered voters who voted yes or no on a particular issue in the last election.

Wouldn’t it be nice if email systems were also capable of mass emailings that included prepackaged queries such as the political voter question mentioned above?

Well those email systems are not too far out there. Later this year, Stanford University will test a prototype email system that will allow users to send email to people who meet the criteria requirements of such queries without knowing in advance the email addresses of the targeted audience. The technology is called “semantic email addressing”.

System administrators and email administrators will need to learn about this new technology as it will impact their traffic and security. Imagine being able to send and receive broadcast email messages with an email system that incorporates semantic queries as part of an email client application. New security filters may need to be created to identify and potentially screen out such email broadcasts.

Semantic email technologies allow the senders to specify groups of people as the intended recipients. You’ll be able to send email to not just atomic email recipients as we do today but to those recipients who have a common set of characteristics such as all people who graduated from a certain University before or after a specific year.

Choosing a set of email recipients would be as easy as pulling down a menu and choosing from a list of queries associated with an intended audience.

If you want to read more about Semantic email you can peruse the articles at the following sites:

http://www.technologyreview.com/web/22008/?a=f

http://www.cs.washington.edu/research/semweb/email.html

http://turing.cs.washington.edu/papers/www2004.pdf