email report software

December 18th, 2005

One of the things I always really liked about Eudora — ok, the only thing I really liked about Eudora — is that it gave you the ability to look at “reports” of your email usage; who’s been emailing you, who you’ve been emailing, how much email you get in a week, how much email you send in a week, etc. Nifty data for anyone who spends a lot of time in their email client.

So I’ve been working on a little program to bring that to Mail.app. Right now, it’s very basic, and it only generates one report (“email-report.html”) which it dumps on your desktop and opens in TextEdit. That report will give you a hyperlinked chart which consists of the people in your Address Book, the last message they sent you, and the last message you sent them. The report is color-coded, so if you’ve communicated with them today, it’s bright green; if you’ve communicated with them this month, it’s darker green; and if you haven’t communicated with them during this month, it’s red. If you haven’t communicated in a year, it’s black, and if you’ve never communicated via email ever, it’s grey.

This release is a little rough, with some known cosmetic bugs, but it works it works for some people, not for everyone. I’m releasing this solely to get some feedback; does this baseline work for you? What other reports might be useful? Is the color-coding helpful? Is any of this of any use to anyone at all? Let me know — I’d like to develop this into a really useful tool for Mail.app users. Also, clearly I need a much more fun name for the application; any and all suggestions are warmly welcomed.

UPDATE: This stopped working a couple system updates ago and I’m not sure why. If you’ve got the energy and/or desire to fix it, here’s the source code. All I ask is that you drop me a line if you fix it so I can grab a fixed copy myself.

~jeff



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  • http://www.timgaden.com/hawkwings Tim Gaden

    Hi Jeff.

    Happy New Year!

    Has there been any further development on the email reports front?

  • http://ldopa.net Jeff

    Tim,

    There has been, thanks for asking. I’ll post a new beta in a week or so.

    ~jeff

  • rei_vilo

    Bonjour!

    I had a crash with a message “AppleScript Error: the variable short_year_last_email_newest is not defined (-2753)”.

    I am currently using the French release of 10.4.5.

    Best regards,

    — rei_vilo

  • mark

    I got the same error as rei_vilo. The it jsuts sits and thinks (“building e-mail report”) without stopping. I’m running 10.4.7 on a G4 powerbook.

    -m.

  • http://digigarden.blogspot.com Katherine Lent

    I think this is a nifty app. I don’t have too much use for it now, I would have in my last job. but I think it is very useful for those that have the need.

  • Ken

    When I attempt to run this on my 17″ LCD iMac (G4) running MacOS 10.4.8, I get an Applescript error:

    Address Book got an error: sh: -c: line 1: unexpected EOF while looking for matching ‘”
    sh: -c: line 2: syntax error: unexpected end of file(2)

  • Lee

    “AppleScript Error: the variable short_year_last_email_newest is not defined (-2753)”

    is the result on my 12″ Powerbook G4, running 10.4.7

  • Peter

    Great idea,

    I just got an applescript error.

    Will check back for updates thought.

    Email me if you woud like a screen shot of the error window.

    Cheers,
    Peter

  • DivaDiana

    Would like to give it a shot but am usually unlucky trying programs out. I have lots of stuff on my computer. Could this conflict with any other programs and cause me stress. I am not very savy and when conflicts occur I am lost usually. Please let me know

  • faz

    I, too, have the error :

    The variable short_year_last_email_newest is not defined. (-2753)

    Then the candy bar spin forever…

    I’m on 10.4.8, french.

    Could we hope for a fix, or at least an editable version for us to fix it ourselves ?

  • goocher

    Tried to run it on MacBook Pro 10.4.8 and got message: variable short_year_last_email_newest is not defined. (-2753)

    Candy bar spun forever.

  • http://www.pictopia.com Mark Liebman

    Hi,
    I am looking for a way to create Address Book entries for all of the people who have emailed me. Then I want to create a whitelist text file, one email address per line, for an active spam killer installation. Can your tool(s) help me with this?

  • Lucian Fratila

    Hi Mark,

    This might help. When I migrated to mail.app from Thunderbird and imported all my emails, I got all the addresses of people I exchanged emails with added into the “Previous Recipients” list (Window menu). You might want to try this – export and reimport your mail, then select all the entries the Previous Recipients list and click “Add to Address Book”.

    Of course, I’m sure an applescript would do this sweeter, but this is just a quick hack that might work as well…

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  • austinjp

    I have a couple of inboxes, and the app seems to only consider one of them. I wonder how hard it would be for me to specify which mail box(es) I wanted to analyze…

  • ravi

    Hi Jeff,

    I thought email reports was an interesting app and would be nice to know some stats related to the emails i get. BUT, on running it, I get:

    “AppleScript Error: the variable short_year_last_email_newest is not defined (-2753)”

    I’m using mac Mini 1.42GHz PPC, Mac OS X 1.4.9

  • clickty

    any chance of an update – i get the same error as above :(

  • clickty

    tried using a macbook running 10.5

  • shakenmilk

    Same thing here with Leopard on MBPro :-(

  • G Dubb

    This is not working for MAC OS X 10.5.3

  • shakenmilk

    Any chance it may run on Leopard one day ?

  • http://martin.cleaver.org Martin Cleaver

    How about making this a Google Code project?

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  • http://www.rewardguide.co.uk john wander

    This would work for me if I had a Mac computer

  • Nikolaj

    Same error as reported by “ravi” and others. Error displayed: “AppleScript Error: the variable short_year_last_email_newest is not defined (-2753)”

    2.13GHz MacBook Air 10.6.2.

  • Dave

    Got the email report script working past the error message and it's producing output though not sure it's what you were used to getting…. don't know if you're interested or not.

    Be happy to send you what I've done