What is ThreadVis?
ThreadVis displays the response hierarchy of email messages. All messages in a thread are displayed as dots and are laid our horizontally, sorted chronologically, the oldest message to the left.
| One Colour | More Colours |
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| The currently selected message is displayed in blue, along with arcs to its parents and children. Messages sent by the user are displayed hollow. In the above sample, the second message was sent by the user and the third is a reply to the second message. Note that the second message is highlighted (selected in the mail client), as are its arcs. |
Messages from different authors can be displayed in different colours. Here, the currently selected message is marked by a black circle. By using different colours for different authors, you can immediately see that the first and third message have been written by the same author. |
Time Scaling
Normally, the messages of each thread are laid out horizontally and the spacing between two messages is constant. If you enable time scaling, the horizontal spacing between two messages is proportional to the time difference between those two messages.
The example below immediately shows that the time between the first and the second message is much longer than the time between the second and the third message.
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| A thread without Time Scaling | The same thread with Time Scaling enabled |
Timeline
In addition to using Time Scaling, a Timeline can be displayed. This adds a short description of the time between two messages.
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| A thread with Time Scaling, but without a Timeline | The same thread with Time Scaling and Timeline |
How do they fit in?
ThreadVis is displayed in the header box of Mozilla Thunderbird. The visualisation is automatically resized to fit in the space provided. The above screenshot is also an example for a longer thread and how it is displayed in the add-on.
Visualisation in Separate Window, with Legend
