Properties of evolving e-mail networks

A model of an e-mail network, with nodes as e-mail address books of users and links as the records of e-mail addresses in address books, was investigated. It was observed that the statistical properties of this e-mail network, such as average number of links, average path length, and clustering coefficient, were strongly affected by various parameter settings in simulations. It was also observed that the average number of links tends to increase or decrease depending on the values of generation and deletion threshold, and also the time interval to execute the generation and deletion procedure. The results show that with small values of average path length and high clustering coefficient, the network exhibits small-world characteristic properties.