Scale-free topology of e-mail networks

Holger Ebel, Lutz-Ingo Mielsch, Stefan Bornholdt

Published 2002-01-25, updated 2002-02-12Version 2

We study the topology of e-mail networks with e-mail addresses as nodes and e-mails as links using data from server log files. The resulting network exhibits a scale-free link distribution and pronounced small-world behavior, as observed in other social networks. These observations imply that the spreading of e-mail viruses is greatly facilitated in real e-mail networks compared to random architectures.