Email Views and Thread Arcs
Readers know I’m kind of a dork when it comes to email. I’ve got some things I look for in a mail client, primarily the ability to access emails offline, because I want access to email when I don’t have an internet connection. I know, I’ve got the minority view on this because internet connections are becoming ever more ubiquitous. Old habits die hard. This demand has knocked out GMail for quite some time, and for a while I did not like GMail’s web interface. But I grudgingly grew to acknowledge the utility of its ‘conversation’ view.
Back to being a dork – I spent some time searching around for alternative solutions. I tried Outlook 2007 and that was a disaster. I came across an IBM Research project called Remail which explored a new way of interacting with email. They even built a prototype it appears, but did not release it.
I then discovered two things – how to hack a ‘conversation view’ in thunderbird and a way of showing ‘Thread Arcs’ to help visualization conversations. Typically ‘thread view’ only shows messages in your inbox – thus you can’t review the messages you’ve sent without searching your Sent mail folder. But there’s an option to ‘place a copy in the folder of the message you are replying to’, which when used with threading can fake a conversation view.
Alexander Hubmann made a Thunderbird plugin called ThreadVis which enables Thread Arcs. Check out some examples below:
As you can see, it shows the time between messages, the way people reply to messages, etc. The colors are coded for various people involved (red is for me), the brightness is related to how immediate the messages are. What’s also nice is that you can click on the nodes and go to that message in question. Kinda neat, I’m gonna give this a try.
Greg Said,
March 2, 2009 @ 4:44 am
THe web client of GMail shows sent messages in the thread without the goofy graphics. That seems to work pretty well.
G