Mail Trends is a Phyton-based tool that lets you generate a visual representation of various statistics of your Gmail accounts. The code was developed by Google Developer Mihai Paparita who wanted to generate the same statistical trending used by Google Reader and Search History.Generating the statistics take a few minutes if you don’t have too many emails stored in your Inbox and other Gmail folders. But the more complicated part is setting up and actually getting the program to run. But if you are adept with Phyton and how Google codes work, you might find it easier than I did.
Here are the things you can generate by using Mail Trends on your Gmail accounts:
- Distribution of messages by year, month, day, day of week and time of day
- Distribution of messages by size and your top 40 largest messages
- The top senders, recipients and mailing lists you’re on
- Distributions of senders, recipients and mailing lists over time
- The distribution of thread lengths and the lists and people that result in the longest threads
And here are screenshots of sample output:
Hopefully, Mail Trends get into a full blown Google supported program similar to Google Analytics as it could be a useful tool for analyzing Gmail account usages. Just don’t ask me why you would want to analyze your Gmail accounts.
