There is no way I will let some third-party online tool access my inbox. Privacy and security are much more important to me than some fancy gimmick visualisation.
I would love to do this kind of analysis on my mails. Any chance for a local offline tool?
I wrote software which scans a hard disk for email in any of 6 formats, converts them to Mbox (eg, standard, with emails one after another in plaintext), creates 2 indexes (full-text and SQL) then lets you search all your emails with a Lucene query (full text of email bodies) or an SQL query (MySql or PostGres or SQLite - SQL database of common email headers). It doesn't run on 'the cloud'; it's a Windows application.
An example search is 'All emails from "geocities.com" between March 2009 and April 2009, with attachments.
I haven't found anyone who wants such a program. Anyone here interested?
I wrote 'mu' (http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu), which let's you index/search maildirs; I'm currently adding glue to use it as an emacs-based e-mail client as well (basically, something between wanderlust and notmuch).
Anyway, to get back on-topic, as an alternative way to analyse your mails, I've added guile (scheme) bindings, and it's pretty easy to get all kinds of interesting statistics from your mails -- see https://gitorious.org/mu/mu/blobs/master/toys/muile/README
> It’s sad but inescapably true: Your email inbox is your life.
I'm a bit surprised by the nostalgic tone of the first paragraph. Why is that supposed to be sad? I find it pretty cool, because it is so easy to keep an archive of every mail you send or receive, unlike paper mail.
17 comments
[ 15.0 ms ] story [ 1904 ms ] threadI would love to do this kind of analysis on my mails. Any chance for a local offline tool?
An example search is 'All emails from "geocities.com" between March 2009 and April 2009, with attachments.
I haven't found anyone who wants such a program. Anyone here interested?
Do you have an email address or do you want me to post my email address? Or not? ;-)
Uses the excellent Xapian library to perform just about any search you'd need.
Great application of the archive concept though.
Anyway, to get back on-topic, as an alternative way to analyse your mails, I've added guile (scheme) bindings, and it's pretty easy to get all kinds of interesting statistics from your mails -- see https://gitorious.org/mu/mu/blobs/master/toys/muile/README
I'm a bit surprised by the nostalgic tone of the first paragraph. Why is that supposed to be sad? I find it pretty cool, because it is so easy to keep an archive of every mail you send or receive, unlike paper mail.