This dataset was collected and prepared by the CALO Project (A Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes). It contains data from about 150 users, mostly senior management of Enron, organized into folders. The corpus contains a total of about 0.5M messages. This data was originally made public, and posted to the web, by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during its investigation.

The email dataset was later purchased by Leslie Kaelbling at MIT, and turned out to have a number of integrity problems. A number of folks at SRI, notably Melinda Gervasio, worked hard to correct these problems, and it is thanks to them (not me) that the dataset is available. The dataset here does not include attachments, and some messages have been deleted "as part of a redaction effort due to requests from affected employees". Invalid email addresses were converted to something of the form user@enron.com whenever possible (i.e., recipient is specified in some parse-able format like "Doe, John" or "Mary K. Smith") and to no_address@enron.com when no recipient was specified.

I get a number of questions about this corpus each week, which I am unable to answer, mostly because they deal with preparation issues and such that I just don't know about. If you ask me a question and I don't answer, please don't feel slighted.

I am distributing this dataset as a resource for researchers who are interested in improving current email tools, or understanding how email is currently used. This data is valuable; to my knowledge it is the only substantial collection of "real" email that is public. The reason other datasets are not public is because of privacy concerns. In using this dataset, please be sensitive to the privacy of the people involved (and remember that many of these people were certainly not involved in any of the actions which precipitated the investigation.)