BusyMail

These are a couple of scripts that compute statistics ("stress" and "procrastination") from the data in the email inbox.

For example, here are my stats as they appear on my webpage:

<div class='figure' id='stats'>

    <p class='graphics'> 
        <img id='stats_count' src="http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~andrea/busyplot/count.png"  alt='Count'/> 
        <img id='stats_age' src="http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~andrea/busyplot/age.png"    alt='Age'/> 
    </p> 
             
<p class='caption' style='font-style: italic'> 
    Fig. 2. Stress and procrastination levels in the last 7 days.
    Stress is measured by the number of flagged messages in the email inbox;
    procrastination is measured by the median age of those messages.
    <img id='updated' src="http://www.cds.caltech.edu/~andrea/busyplot/updated.gif" alt='Update'/> 
</p> 

</div>

Usage

The first script busymail_log downloads the headers of email messages in a given mailbox, and stores them as a YAML file in a given directory.

Example usage:

busymail_log --host imap.gmail.com --username <user> --password <pwd> \
             --folder "[Gmail]/Starred" --storage logs/
    

The second script loads all the YAML files from the given directory, computes some statistics, and plots them to file.

busymail_plot --storage logs/ --output figures/

Note that if you only have a few datapoints, the plot will not be clearly visible with the default axis properties (showing 1 week of data).

If you create a cron job with these two commands (and perhaps a rsync to your website), you can create an automatically updating summary of your activity.

Installation

Install using:

python setup.py develop

The prerequisites are:

• pyyaml
• numpy
• matplotlib
• imapclient

Install them before attempting the above command, as most of the times setup.py is not smart enough to install them correctly.