17

Are there any publicly available personal mailboxes except for the Enron corpus?

Doesn't have to be a large corpus, even a single mailbox of a single person will help me (step by step...)

Technically it would be best to have it in mbox format, but I would accept any format.

I am interested in both work and personal mailboxes, in any language. Having said that, I am not interested in mailing lists and forum threads (which are also widely available in the same format - mbox).

To be more specific, I'm looking for mailboxes that are large (50+ outgoing mails, 1000+ will be even better) and not just a single thread of communication with the same person or a handful of mails.

philshem
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zvisofer
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    The harddrives of Aaron Swartz are supposed to be released publicly, but I think it is held up in court. (archived link - http://web.archive.org/web/20130312003759/http://www.aaronsw.com/2002/continuity ) – philshem Feb 15 '15 at 13:05
  • Define 'personal'. If it's just a person, and not 'not work related', then you might be interested in Jeb Bush's recent dump of all of his e-mail. (which they had to re-release because the first dump contained sensitive information in it) – Joe Feb 18 '15 at 00:54
  • Out of curiosity, why not the Enron corpus? – pyb Feb 18 '15 at 20:12
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    I did use the Enron corpus. I trained a model based on Enron corpus and I would like to test it on other corpora to mesure the model's domain-adaptability – zvisofer Feb 18 '15 at 20:14

7 Answers7

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Here is a dataset of emails of a governor in Florida. It contains all email communications this governor made from 1999 to 2007. It contains about 280K emails. It was made public for political reasons I believe.

D.W.
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Yulong
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You'll have to do some Google detective work, but you can find individual .mbox files that have been shared online, perhaps accidentally.

Steps:

  1. Search google for "filetype:mbox"

  2. Start removing top hits, like "Facebook" and "List, using the '-' (minus) operator: example.

  3. Add a search term for typical ways files are shared, like FTP: example.

  4. Iterate over steps 2 and 3 by adding more and more search terms (both 'include' and 'exclude').

  5. Try adding search terms that show up in typical personal emails, like "Do You Yahoo!?": example.

  6. Eventually you can find individual .mbox files, and some are quite big. Here is an example, although to find big .mbox folders and files, you'll have to dig some more.

  7. If you remove the .mbox file extension and try the webpage for the folder than contains it (i.e. for http://example.com/folder/sample.mbox, try http://example.com/folder/), you can often find other .mbox files in the same folder. If you find an FTP or HTTP shared file system, you can use the folder names to find similarly shared data.

  8. Please act ethically, and if you find extremely personal information, you may want to email those involved. You have their email, after all.

Note: Easy to combine .mbox files (see here).

Community
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philshem
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You can download raw emails from the Wikileaks data backup site (wlstorage.net).

Search the file page for 'email'. Clicking on that link will bring you to an HTML email page. But you can find the corresponding email files, and perhaps .mbox formats, with the torrent download - LINK.

philshem
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About 3,000 of Hillary Clinton's mails were released. Some of the mails are redacted.

zvisofer
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The Sunlight Foundation has created websites for two released email datasets (Sarah Palin and Elena Kagan). Unfortunately, both domains are not functioning.

Blog posts: one and two and three.

Luckily, their github repos with code & data still exist!

Sarah Palin - original emails were released on paper and several news organizations have done OCR to digitize. Probably less quality than Elena Kagan's.

Elena Kagan

There is also lots of python code in these repos in order to extract the text files.

Another source could be the "Sarah Palin email topic browser" which may provide an export of emails: http://sarah-palin.herokuapp.com/

albert
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philshem
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Library of Virginia has archived emails during Tim Kaine's governorship:
Kaine Email Project @ LVA
A Guide To The Governor Timothy M. Kaine Administration Electronic Files, Email, 2002-2010 (Bulk 2006-2009)
Search the Collection

albert
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One of the positive things about leaks and data breaches is that they can spawn new corpuses.

Note that since these were obtained illegally, you may not want to use them. Both because IANAL and don't know if there are legal issues and because people could see it as unethical. Some of these can also be politically charged topics, so I'd advise not using many of them. But they are good corpuses nonetheless.

  • Podesta's GMail archive: can't find the count, but it's a lot and they include full headers in MBox format. They also date back really far. Relating to politics and other miscellaneous topics.
  • DNC Email Server: Around 22k emails relating to politics and the 2016 US General Election. I have been unable to find a premade mbox format, but this link has some information in the comments about how to scrape them.
  • Clinton Email Server: others have mentioned this already, but I wouldn't use it as redactions from the State Department and missing emails make it less useful.
  • GIFiles leak: over 5 million emails from a corporation from July 2004 through December 2011. Very big corpus. Archive can be downloaded from the Internet Archive they are 24GB compressed and 90GB uncompressed.
  • Sony Hacks: Lots of emails, can't find a download link.

I will try to add to this later, I need to put my phone away.

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