There are many information management issues with e-mail. As a busy lawyer, you may be trying to find information quickly or looking for information that could be in multiple locations. If you are a Google Chrome and Google Mail user, you may find Graph Your Inbox to be a helpful addition to your e-mail management toolkit.
At first, I thought this was primarily a trending tool. When you install the Google Chrome extension from Graph Your Inbox and click on the icon, it loads up a non-descript search box. Type in a keyword and it will go into your Google Mail and retrieve matching messages. The first thing you notice is that it highlights trends relating to the keyword you searched. This is interesting but, more importantly, you can click on the graphed data to select a date. It will return all of the messages on that date that match your keyword, and you can then select any to read them.
You can search multiple items. Here’s an example showing a search for an e-mail address (one of my alter egos) and a specific term. So I can find messages with that address and keyword and then narrow by date, select the date and see what was being discussed.
Example of searching two topics in Graph Your Inbox
Since the search is executed across multiple folders, it may help you to find information more quickly. Google Mail’s search is great at returning search results based on keywords, but you may like the graph to show periods of high, or low, activity.
