[MlMt] New: Visualize bundle

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

Hi MailMate users,

if you haven't already noticed it then there is a new bundle available 
in the Bundles preferences pane. Its name is “Visualize” and its 
main purpose is to make cool visualizations of email history and trends. 
After enabling it in the Bundles preferences pane then you should have 
two new menu items in the Command menu. Select a (large) set of emails 
(⌘A) and then try them out. Don't forget to hover the mouse over 
various parts of the images to get more info.

The bundle was created by Sherif Soliman (thanks!) with a bit of my help 
and it's **work-in-progress**. If you have feature requests or any 
issues to report then use the [Github 
issues](https://github.com/sheriferson/Visualize.mmBundle/issues) page. 
General remarks can be sent to this list where Sherif is also available. 
[Github](https://github.com/sheriferson/Visualize.mmBundle) is also 
where the main repository resides in case you want to contribute to the 
bundle or you want to check out a cutting-edge version (the bundle 
available via the Bundles preferences pane is my fork of the bundle).

Currently the bundle uses Safari to display an HTML page. This page uses 
the [D3.js](http://d3js.org) JavaScript library to do the 
visualizations. Sherif also added some buttons to save the results as 
image files. You can see some examples on the [Github 
page](https://github.com/sheriferson/Visualize.mmBundle). I was actually 
a bit surprised to see that “View ▸ Distortion Mode” works, but I 
guess that's quite convenient :-)

I had a lot of fun analyzing the mailing list and my sent messages. I 
used MailMate to create smart mailboxes with various subsets of emails 
and then I used the bundle to visualise the results. The following two 
images are based on my Sent Messages mailbox (emails since I got my own 
server as part of working on MailMate). The first one shows I write 
almost half of my emails on Tuesday+Wednesday. The other one shows that 
I don't like to write emails in the night unless I'm on vacation in 
Thailand (February, 2013). You can even see that I rarely write emails 
18.00-20.00 (family time). It's also quite obvious that the email 
“burden” has gotten worse over the years, but it appears to have 
been at its “worst” late 2013 which is exactly when I did the crowd 
funding campaign.

Note that the quality of the images has been reduced to allow inclusion 
on the mailing list. It looks much better when using the bundle.

Have fun!

Known “issues”:

* MailMate cannot not include children of collapsed items when calling a 
command.
* For large selections of emails then the “Emails by Sender” command 
needs some way to limit the number of “categories”. A histogram with 
thousands of bars is not readable (but hovering with the mouse still 
works quite well).

![](cid:B1C78C8F-8062-4014-B953-EA1FF76EFC17 at freron.com "day.png")

![](cid:23852023-D109-4275-B6C7-84C407B0829A at freron.com "time.png")

-- 
Benny
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