Visualizing a Personal Social Network of Email Archives For Re-Finding

Email has become an important communication medium that people routinely rely on to achieve their daily work. However, managing email accounts for life-long communication is not an easy task. Users have different strategies for archiving their messages and have varied understanding and expectations of retrieval and how to use that capability. We have designed and implemented a tool, VisPEAM that applies the benefits of visualization of social network in personal email archive management. This helps users refind email messages by using people’s name, folder and subjects as search criteria. The graphical representation helps users to find their old emails by exploring the social relationships in different folders as well as shows how frequently those people exchange email messages regarding a particular topic. Moreover, the graphic visualization helps people manage their growing collections of email messages with respect to their social relationships.