Data is awesome. Enough data, and you can figure out all SORTS of crazy stuff. My own most recent example is cleaning out my work Inbox. I constantly bump into the upper limit of my storage on our Exchange server, because I’m a packrat. Tonight, I was cleaning things out via the webmail frontend…which has limited search/sort functionality, so I had to get creative.

But it’s fascinating what you can do with good metadata; I seldom delete based on the text of an email’s body…it’s from:, or from and size, or from domain, or date, or subject thread, etc. Really interesting. Dumping the majority of the metadata into the sort of in-memory database that Jon Udell has been espousing lately could probably turn up some really interesting info about me and my interactions via email. Coupled with the types of analysis tools that Nathan Eagle is playing with, you’ve got potential!