Computer viruses spread by attaching to an e-mail message and sending themselves to users whose addresses are in the e-mail address book of the recipients. Here we investigate a simple model of an evolving e-mail network, with nodes as e-mail address books of users and links as the records of e-mail addresses in the address books. Within specific periods, some new links are generated and some old links are deleted. We study the statistical properties of this e-mail network and observe the effect of the evolution on the structure of the network. We also find that the balance between the generation procedure and deletion procedure is dependent on different parameters of the model.

• Received 13 January 2004

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.70.066121