Content classification of developer emails

Emails related to the development of a software system contain information about design choices and issues encountered during the development process. Exploiting the knowledge embedded in emails with automatic tools is challenging, due to the unstructured, noisy and mixed language nature of this communication medium. Natural language text is often not well-formed and is interleaved with languages with other syntaxes, such as code or stack traces.

We present an approach to classify email content at line level. Our technique classifies email lines in five categories (i.e., text, junk, code, patch, and stack trace) to allow one to subsequently apply ad hoc analysis techniques for each category. We evaluated our approach on a statistically significant set of emails gathered from mailing lists of four unrelated open source systems.