Mail Explorer - Spatial and Temporal Exploration of Electronic Mail

Abstract

In today s world, e-mail has become one of the most important means of communication in business and private lives due to its efficiency. However, the problems start as soon as mail volumes go beyond the scope of human information processing capabilities. Firstly, time does not allow for leaving certain messages unanswered for a long time, and in certain cases, for reading all messages. Secondly, the dilemma of electronic filters leaves a choice of too many junk mails getting through versus a risk of solicited mails being dumped. In this paper we present a new interactive visual data mining approach for analyzing individual e-mail communication. It combines classical visual analytics (help to identify pattern such as peaks and trends over time) with geo-spatial map distortions (help to understand the routes of e-mails). Experiments show that our visual e-mail explorer produces useful and interesting visualizations of large collections of e-mail and is practical for exploring temporal and geo-spatial patterns hidden in the e-mail data.