Learn everything about 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.
Clicking on a message dot automatically navigates to the clicked message, no matter which folder the message is stored in.
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 fourth message was sent by the user, which triggered two separate replies.
Messages from different authors can be displayed in different colours. By using different colours for different authors, you can immediately see that the fifth and sixth message have been written by the same author.
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.
A thread without Time Scaling.
The same thread with Time Scaling enabled.
To avoid longer pauses to disrupt the display, the time differences can also be logarithmically scaled.
In addition to using Time Scaling, a Timeline can be displayed. This adds a short description of the time between two messages.
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.
Hovering over a message dot previews the message's content without switching to it, allowing for a quick look when looking for a specific reply in a longer thread.
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