E-Mail Analysis

My cousin turned me onto this nifty widget Google Chrome has that will analyze you're Gmail inbox and give you a pretty cool graph. It is located here. I have been using Gmail as my primary email for over 6 years now. That's a large number of emails that I've sent and received. It comes out to almost 25,000 archived emails. I once read a great blog post by my good friend Brian where he ran an analysis of his Inbox. It was pretty interesting and I wanted to do something similar. I tried for like five minutes trying to figure out how to download all my email data as CSV, and then gave up and drank a Keystone Ice. I found that while the Ice was harder to come by, the black label looked really cool.

Blue are all emails, Red are sent emails

I had assumed the top chart would look something like this. It's like you can tell which months classes started and finished each year. The second chart gives some information that I always wondered about. How much of my email traffic comes through early in the week. Well if November of 2008 is any indication, Mondays and Tuesday accounted for like 50% of the email traffic in a given week. You can also see that like most people I receive emails at a much larger rate than I send them by about a 1:10 ratio. But that's pretty common.

So where did all those emails come from? Let's go to the chart.

Wow. Of the 25,000 emails I have archived about 1 in 8 are facebook (blue) related. That is a little scary. The other ones are from the U of M class web-based site Ctools (red), online risk (orange) and emails from bus drivers (green). Combined these account for like a third of all the emails I've ever received. It looks like I played a lot of online risk in July of 2008. The really cool graph is the bottom right. I've stopped getting emails from my classes which makes sense. My online risk playing must have gone downhill. I am definitely less social judging by my reduced use of Facebook to near Sophomore year levels. Finally, my job doesn't spam my personal email address so often. It looks like I much be more boring now. Maybe that is the cause of the reduced blogging.

Perhaps I'll do some more graphing of my emails to try and determine exactly when I started overusing the term "buttmuncher" in my emails.