If You Can Analyze Your Email…

If you can analyze your email, what would you like to see? This is a question that keeps popping up in my head.

Here are a few things I can think of:

  1. I want a knowledge base created from my email. Ideally something like a wiki. I want to track various projects, initiatives, debates, decisions I was involved in, with my teams, customers, friends.
  2. I want to know how much of email I read, skipped, replied, engaged in long threads of conversation. I especially like the long threads of conversation, bit. Something important was happening there and I would like to know what it was all about. For example several years ago we debated a few features in our products intensely and made some decisions. It is all sitting there in the email.
  3. I want to know what I missed from the email I have not read. There are times I redirect certain types of email into specific folders (labels) and once in a while bulk delete them.
  4. I want to know the people I communicate with most – over a time line. It is not just who I communicate with. It will be nice to also know what I communicate about.
  5. I want to know how much of my email comes from my interactions on Social media like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Scoop-it and others? How much comes from my mailing lists and discussion forums? What is my involvement quotient in these (just read, read and replied, read/replied/talked about, read and forwarded to others etc.)
  6. I want names and addresses extracted from email. In fact, I would love to do different types of mining. It may differ based on the types of email.
  7. I want special processing on some email (like Google alerts). I would like put them through filters and analyzers. The analyzer may be as simple as link extractor, topic cloud creator or something more complex.

There are more geeky things I would like to do, but this list is a good starting point. What are your needs?