Why MailVis

MailVis improves our everyday interactions with emails. As part of a visualization project, the goal of this plugin is to extend emails with visualizations. We get the data for visualizations directly from emails by analyzing them. In order to receive email informations we use the Gmail API.

We have two kind of visualizations. The first kind gives an overview about the whole email traffic, the second analyzes an email thread and extracts keywords from this thread. Once we got all data needed for a visualization, we add this data to a cache. Using a cache is efficient and we don’t have to call the Gmail API every time the user reloads a site. Every once in a while we ask if the user received new emails. In that case, we update the cache with the new information.

We made a flexible extension, every visualization can be turned on or off in a settings menu. Also general-, cache- and specific visualization options exist in the settings menu. We save settings and cached data in the chrome storage. Data we retrieved from Gmail about the user is stored encrypted to protect sensitive information. The extension currently only works on Chrome and would need some adaptions to run on other browsers.

All in all we hope that this plugin enhance your workflow with emails!