Email Usage Statistics Collector

Along with the prevalence of email, a number of free email managers have been developed to assist people to deal with personal and interpersonal affairs. Beside sending and receiving email, they provide a diversity of function such as memorandum and calendar. Many researchers are interested in how people communicate via email. They may have questions such as " how long does it take them to reply? " This project has developed and implemented an extension for Thunderbird to collect statistics about email use. This application collects statistics from Thunderbird by which the user can simply email the result to be collected for research purpose. It is required to be compatible with IMAP protocol which is used by several email service providers like Gmail. Furthermore, it was designed to protect users " information from disclosure. To guarantee data " s confidentiality, this application is equipped with an anonymiser which can replace real address with numbers. Also, it allows the users to review the statistical reports before forwarding them. The outcome of this project is an add-on application which is able to investigate and collect data from thunderbird " s embedded database and automatically compose a statistical report. It will help us to better understand humans " behaviours and improve the designs of email managers. Recently, the add-on application has been accepted by Mozilla, and the download link is available now.