This was all over tech news headlines today, but Google is finally supporting IMAP for Gmail. I’m excited about this for a couple of reasons — first, it means that I can finally back up all the e-mail I’ve sent over the last couple years or so since I started using Gmail. I love Gmail, and I can’t imagine going back to an email client with less support for viewing e-mail threads, but I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with all that personal data living only on Google’s servers. The other reason I’m excited about this is that it opens up some new possibilities for me to play with visualizing e-mail again. When I was working on Emdash I used my MIT e-mail account for testing, so I was missing over a year’s worth of sent messages. Now that I can access those messages easily with an IMAP interface, I have some data I can use to start working on visualizing two-way e-mail communication. And I can use E15 to do it. I’m psyched.
Any chance of getting some screenshots of emdash, both now and as you move things forward? I’m very interested in e-mail visualization and have been doing some visualizing of my own (see my blog if you’re interested), but as a rule do not provide my account info for anything, no matter how cool the visualization may be :). (I have thought about creating a sanitized throw-away IMAP mailbox, but I fear I am too lazy for that.)
In any event, I look forward to seeing what 3d visualizations you will create with E15!
Andrew
Thanks, Andrew! Emdash doesn’t keep/log any of your account data on our server, but I can understand your unease about sharing the data. I’m not actively developing the project anymore, but I do hope to get some screenshots up eventually. It may not be for a while though, because these days E15 is taking up most of my research time.
Thanks for the blog link — your contact sparklines are exactly the sort of thing I wanted in Emdash, but lacked the data to visualize! I look forward to seeing more of your visualization work, too!
Cheers,
Kate