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Email Analysis Tools

Posted on: Tuesday 5/22, 2007;  9:36 PM

One set of tools that, in an earlier version of A WorkLife FrameWork, was present but not quite as effective until Mathematica 6 was released makes use of functions such as EmailNetwork and EmailAddresses.  These functions are accessed from the Email Analysis buttons on the Email Palette in A WorkLife FrameWork 2.0.  They are respectively the Show Network and Harvest Addresses buttons:

When you click on the Show Network button a dialog opens that allows you to select any number of mailbox files (see below though for a constraint on what sort of files are allowed).  Then the various emails in these files are analyzed and a network graphic is generated and presented in a new notebook showing the connections between email addresses based on the To, From, Cc, and Bcc fields in your emails.  Here is an example generated from the mailbox where I keep emails concerning one of my consulting clients:

In this example, my cursor was placed over the center dot and a tooltip shows the email address associated with that node (my email address in this case).  One can learn a lot from exploring a representation as simple as this.  For example, the density of links between two nodes gives a visual sense of the amount of correspondence that went between the two nodes.  Quite simple, but very instructive if you want to know what has been taking up the greater part of your correspondence time.

This is a tool that will continue to evolve using the power of Mathematica 6.  Functionality that will appear in upcoming releases of  A WorkLife FrameWork's will include the ability to explore information in detail about the nodes and links, which is to say that you will be able to mine details about your correspondence in a point and click way.  You can ask and answer questions such as "who am I networked with who could connect me to person x."  

It is an example of simple but powerful personal data mining.

The detail that I mentioned above concerning the sorts of mail boxes that can be used for this tool is that it is confined to mailboxes in the MBOX format.  This is the native format of Eudora, Thunderbird, Netscape Mail, and a number of others.  When your email archive is not in this standard format (such as with Outlook or Entourage), there are often tools that allow you to harvest your emails and place them in an MBOX compliant file.  Then you can make use of A WorkLife FrameWork's Email analysis tools on these files.

The Harvest Addresses button on under Email Analysis does just that.  If you click it and choose mailboxes a notebook will open that contains a list of all of the email addresses from the headers of the emails in those files.

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