Visualising (visualizing) e-mail

After my previous post, I’ve been doing some further research on Visual Mail interfaces. Of course, like all things Internet, spelling matters. Once I started to use US spelling instead of British, my hit rates went up.I’ve found several papers, some more “academic” than the previous post, none quite as visually appealing, but all trying to address similar issues.This one on Themail is both interesting and perhaps the most relevant because not only have they built an interface, but assessed it as well. The authors are from IBM, HP and MIT so a well credentialed team to actually make something happen here.

The following UI, Exploring Enron, was presented at an e-mail Visualization conference at UC Berkely

IBM have also done some early research back in 2003 with their Remail project, re-inventing e-mail.

Anyway, hope you enjoy looking at these. I present them merely out of interest that there is clearly some activity going on in this space, although it’s not a deluge just yet. My personal opinion is that undoubtably at some point in the not too distant future, a visual interface to our e-mail will be inevitable, but perhaps for now it’s a little distant.