rom the department of useless studies, here?s this: A steady diet of healthy e-mails can change people?s outlook and behaviour regarding eating and increased physical activity, according to a study by two University of Alberta professors.

The 12-week study looked at the effectiveness of e-mails on health received at five large Canadian workplaces.

Ronald Plotnikoff and Linda McCargar divided participants into one group that received health-related e-mails and a control group that did not.

?The intervention group alone showed an increase in physical activity levels and also had more confidence in being able to participate in physical activity at study?s end,? they concluded. ?In addition, the intervention group members recognised more pros and fewer cons to physical activity and were more open to making dietary changes.?

On average the group receiving the health e-mails marginally reduced its mean body mass index (BMI), a measure of body fat based on height and weight. By contrast, the mean BMI for the control group slightly increased.

In the study, workers received weekly e-mail messages, each highlighting the worth of physical activity and good nutrition while also offering suggestions on how to achieve a healthier lifestyle.

Well, I guess the study is good for businesses that want healthier employees. Still on the subject of e-mails, here?s another study that promises to save us from spam.

Oscar Boykin of the University of Florida and Vwani Roychowdhury of the University of California have pioneered a new approach to zapping the junk e-mail that slows productivity.

Boykin has created a system that queries a user?s ?social network? of friends and colleagues to determine if a message is spam or not.

Spam, or unsolicited e-mail, makes up about two-thirds of all e-mail these days. Spam has also become more dangerous with the advent of ?phishing? ? e-mails in which criminals attempt to dupe people into revealing personal financial data.

Phishing accounted for $2.4 billion in fraud affecting nearly two million people, according to a 2004 survey by Gartner.

Normally antispam software blocks incoming spam by picking up keywords or images with previously identified spam.

Under the new system a computer would first check incoming messages as usual. If no match were found, the system would automatically use the Internet to query the recipient?s friends and e-mail contacts.

?Almost all of us have multiple cyberspace identities, and these cyberalter egos are networked together to form a vast cyberspace social network,? they write in a study published at www.arxiv.org. ?This network is distinct from the world-wide-web, which is being queried and mined to the tune of billions of dollars everyday, and until recently, has gone largely unexplored.?

They find that cyberspace social networks possess many of the same complex features that characterise its real counterparts, including ?scale-free degree distributions, low diameter and extensive connectivity?.

The two show that these latent networks are suitable for explorations and management via local-only messaging protocols. Cyberalter egos can communicate via their own address books and can be used to establish a highly decentralised and scalable message passing network, they argue. The network can allow large-scale sharing of information and data. As a particular example of such collaborative systems, they have design a spam filtering system. Their large-scale simulations show that the system achieves a spam detection rate close to 100%, while the false positive rate is kept at around zero.

The proposed software would silently share information with its ?friends? on the network to rule out whether a received message was spam or not.

They liken the system to a peer-to-peer network in which people share music, a very popular thing on the Internet right now.

?Rather than searching for music, your software would send queries across the network in search of other trusted computers that have already identified a message as spam,? Boykin said.

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