Email Analysis: A look at my Gmail Account

Introduction

I have realized that every morning, I follow a very strict ritual. The very first thing I do every morning is groggily checking my email. 

Unfortunately,  I have around 15-25 emails to sort through as soon as I wake up. my alarm generally rings around 8:30am. I like to think that's a really early time to wake up, especially for a student. Why do people wake up so early and send out emails? 

Anyway, throughout the course of the day I end up checking my email at least around 10 times. Since I dedicate to so much time to this task, I thought it was about time I did some analysis and figured out what going on behind my gmail account. What could I discover?

(If you use Hotmail/Outlook or Yahoo Mail, please stop reading this now and never speak to me again. :p)

Analysis Over the Week

As expected, I spend most of my emails on the weekdays. Also, it looks like there is a steady decrease in emails over the course of the week. So, if you really need to reach me, looks like your best bet is emailing me on Mondays.

Analysis Over the Year

Even the number os emails I send over the year appear to be exactly the way I predicted it would look like. There is a huge dip in the summer when I was working for Google and riveted to using my corporate email account instead of my gmail. 

Also, seems like there was a dip over the winter (December and January) when I went back home to visit my family.

February seems a little less busy but it's a short month anyway.

Most Common Domains 

Appears like I have a knack for emailing gmail accounts more than any other account. This seems logical since I coordinate with a lot of people at work through my Google Drive. Stanford comes at a close second while computer science stanford account third on my list.

Random Domain Analysis

Nothing really interesting here. I send most of my emails to edu and com accounts.

Most Common Correspondences

This part is a little interesting. It appears that the person I send most of my emails to is MYSELF. I have sent about 2400 emails back to mysql. Don't worry, I don't have a split personality. This makes perfect sense because I usually send myself emails as a way to transfer documents or short segments of texts between my various laptops. it's hard having a work machine, a travel laptop and a home laptop. I should honestly just set up remote login and transfer documents that way.

The second person I spent the most emails to is my research project partner (1369 emails). Meanwhile, both my co-advisors at Stanford came in at third and forth place with around 520 emails each. That's more than an email EVERY DAY. I hope they aren't sick of me bugging them so often. Also makes me wonder how many emails they have to deal with if every one of their advisees is sending them an email a day on average.

Well, at least I am not wasting time with my emails. It seems like most of it related to my research. Every other person has received significantly few emails from me over the past year.

Word Frequencies

Finally, I decided it would be fun to see what kind of things my emails usually contain. After filtering out common words like my name, and other obvious words, I calculated the most frequent words that I have used. Also, because my birthday is in April, I computed the frequencies for the month of April as a comparison.

Most common words over the past year.

Most common words in April.

I guess I am NOT wasting time on my emails after all. Overall, it looks like I really like talking about "good" "images" and plan lot of "meeting"s. You know you are working when "working" is one of your most frequent words.

Also, in April, it looks like I was doing a lot of "computational" "mathematics". I don't even remember at this point why those words occurs over 200 times each. Also looks like I really wanted everyone to know it was "april" since I used it 446 times.

Conclusion

It's quite clear that by analyzing my emails, Google and obviously the NSA know basically everything they need to about me. They can assume with a high probability that I am a stanford student who lives in California and that I am probably studying or am really interested in computer science and specifically interested in "good" "images". Yup, I guess it's obvious that I am a Computer Vision Researcher.