mail-trends

Overview

Mail Trends lets you analyze and visualize your email (as extracted from an IMAP server). You can see:

• Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
• Distribution of messages by size and your top 40 largest messages
• The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you're on.
• Distributions of senders, recipients and mailing lists over time
• The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads

Getting Started

Requirements

• A Gmail or Google Apps mail account
• Python 2.5 or later

Installation

You will need Cheetah (a template system) installed. You can download it and then follow the installation instructions. If you are using an apt-based Linux distribution sudo apt-get install python-cheetah may be enough for you.

Running

From within the mail-trends directory run the following, replacing the username and passwords as appropriate (if you omit the password in the commandline you will be (securely) prompted for it):

python main.py \
  --server=imap.gmail.com \
  --use_ssl \
  --username=username@gmail.com \
  --me=username@gmail.com,username@somedomain.com \
  --skip_labels

You will be prompted for the password for your account (you can also use --password= to specify it as an argument. The --me argument lets you specify what emails should be considered as being sent to/from you.

The output is in HTML, placed in out/index.html. Open that in your favorite web browser.

Other options

--skip_labels does not categorize messages into labels (there are not stats that use them yet).

--filter_out=... can be used to ignore certain messages. You can use to:username@example.com, from:username@example.com or list:listid.example.com to filter out by recipient, sender or list (you can have multiple filter clauses by separating them with commas).

You can pass in --record and --replay as command line arguments to respectively capture and play black message fetches from the IMAP server. This is meant to aid in development by speeding up data fetches.

--max_messages=NNNN can be used to limit the number of messages that are fetched. Normally the most recent messages are selected, use --random_subset to specify that the messages be chosen over all the messages.

--days=NNNN Fetch mail from last NNNN days. If NNNN is omitted then it defaults to all days until the Unix epoch (effectively all mail)

--date_from Fetches mail from date until the the end of the dataset. Format: %d-%b-%Y

Examples:

Fetch mail from last 10 days: --days=10 Fetch all mail between a certain date and the end of the dataset: --date_from=12-Apr-2012 Fetch all mail from a certain date until 10 days earlier: --date_from=12-Apr-2012 --day=10

History

Original project hosted at http://code.google.com/p/mail-trends/