An explanation of Mass Mail
We define Mass Email as any email that is sent to various different recipients, without making the recipients aware of it.
Mass Email thus differs from Newsletters or Mailing Lists, since these are sent to many different recipients, but the recipients are aware of it. In fact, the whole idea behind Mailing Lists or Newsletters is that lots of different people receive the same content. Our Mass Email Detector, on the other hand, is meant to enable people to verify that an email is genuine in cases where they are not sure if they are the only person that received a particular email..
Furthermore, Mass Email is not just ordinary Spam either. While Spam is also sent to lots of recipients, it mostly consists of unsolicited advertising or of shady and malicious shams. Spam is easy to detect, since verbatim copies of the same content are sent to many recipients. Additionally, Spam is usually of rather poor quality and often contains certain words and expressions that make people aware of the fact that an email is, in fact, Spam. The less straightforward cases of Mass Email, however, such as the job application mentioned above, are more difficult to detect. When sending the same application to many different companies, an applicant may choose to change a small percentage of the content in order to make the email appear more genuine than it actually is. In contrast to ordinary Spam filters, the Mass Email Detector tries to capture the finer nuances of what it means for two texts to be basically the same, so that users can verify that emails that appear genuine actually are.