An Information Filtering Agent in a Flexible Message System

In a widely distributed environment, many occasions arise when people need to filter informationwith email clients. The existing information agents such as Maxims and Message Assistant have capabilities of filtering email messages either by an autonomous agent or by user-defined rules. FlexMA, a variation of FAMES (Flexible Asynchronous Messaging System) is proposed as an information filtering agent. Agents in our system can be scaled up to adapt user's various demands by controlling messages delivered among heterogeneous email clients. Several functionalities are split into each agent in terms of component configuration with the addition of multiple agents'cooperation and negotiation. User-defined rules are collected and executed by these agents in a semi-autonomous manner. This paper demonstrates how this design is feasible in a flexible message system.