A bit over a decade of mail

[ewx]

This is the number of mail messages I actually saved per month; so it exclude spam and cron junk, and also excludes news postings. It does include LJ comments, starting from mid 2002.

Comments

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Hmm, I should try that out myself. (Got a script handy or do I have to write my own one?)

I did produce this a while ago:

I finished my Ph.D. here and started working
           .      |   I started going out with livredor
           #      |     |
           #      |     | .  m
           #      |     | #  #
           #  #   v     v #  #
    Mb  #  #  #  #     #  #  #
        #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #
        #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #
        #  #  #  #  #  #  #  #
        97 98 99 00 01 02 03 04

This is, obviously, not up to date, but I'd have to filter out photos to get a meaningful figure for the later years...

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

This was produced by running

find ~/Library/Mail -name '*.emlx' -print0 |
xargs -0 grep -h -m 1 ^Date: |
perl -ne 'use Date::Parse; s/Date: //; @d = strptime($_); $y=$d[5]+1900; printf "%d %02d\n",$y,$d[4] if 1990<$y and $y<=2008;' |
sort |
uniq -c > messages-per-month
gnuplot <<'END'
set term aqua
set size 0.8,0.4
plot 'messages-per-month' using ($2+($3-1)/12):1 title "Messages per month" with line
END

If you don't use Apple Mail you'll need to change the find and grep commands, and if you have a different way of getting pictures out of gnuplot you'll need to specify a suitable output terminal.

[3c66b.livejournal.com]

Since we're all busy proving that we have too much time on our hands, here's mine (http://hercules.herts.ac.uk/~mjh/plotmail.gif) (green sent, red received, personal mail excluded after mid-2004, mailing lists and spam excluded).

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Well you're all evidently more prolific correspondents than me (http://lethargic-man.livejournal.com/217612.html). Though not impossibly what I lack in number of emails I might make up in length of them...