E-Mail visualization

[konnan]

Hi,
I'm currently working on a project which porpose is to analyse the personal E-Mail traffic in order to get some interesting findings about your own communication pattern. This information will be visualized i.e. display threads found in email (chronological arrangement or with whom the user has mostly communicated over a period of time. Therefore I like to know which information about your personal E-Mail traffic you would like being visualized.
Thank you for your suggestions!

 

[EQ Admin]

For fun it would be interesting to the originating IP addresses as dots or as heat zones (by country?) against a map of the world. Known good email vs spam etc. I don't see how you can gather this information though without raising privacy concerns from your participants.

 

[konnan]

I don't see how you can gather this information though without raising privacy concerns from your participants.

Why should I rais privacy concerns?
The Email-Header contains the originating IP addresses and I wouldn't show these addresses in the world map. hmm?

 

[EQ Admin]

How would you get the information from users? For many people trying to figure out how to get only partial email headers from their emails and submit them would take too much time and they'd probably lose interest. Giving you full emails also gives you lists of valid email addresses that could be sold. Them giving you a user/pass to download a copy would be even worse. I'm just having a little trouble wrapping my head around how you would get only the information you need and in a way that's safe for site visitors to submit.

 

[konnan]

I've already programmed a webmail client where you can connect to multiple E-Mail-providers like (Gmail, hotmail or any costum one(POP3,Imap)) with a variety of security measurements. This is a university project and currently privacy issues aren't my main concern although not completely unimportant.

 

[EQ Admin]

This is more difficult to do but it would be cool if it was a dynamic map showing both incoming and outgoing email. You'd need to lookup the MX records for the recipients and make best guesses for where the email is going. Then you can have a map run over time and show the emails coming and going, and have areas with a mre traffic that others get brighter, burst, something along those lines. I have a piece of software in mind but can't remember the name of it at the moment, I'll check around and see if I can find it.

 

[konnan]

yeah would be nice

 

[EQ Admin]

Here is the link to the software that came to mind this morning : code_swarm

It's for version controlled projects but something like that seeing emails fly around could be fun to watch too

 

[EQ Admin]

Hello,

How is this project going? Have you created anything that is ready to share?