RelatedMail

A plugin for Apple Mail that shows messages related to the currently viewed message.

Download

Requires Mac OS X Leopard

Current version: 0.8.4 beta (Universal Binary) Release Notes

RelatedMail is Freeware. If my grand plans for more features are realized I might consider shareware in the future.

Screenshots

Installation

Quit the Mail application.
Download, expand, and mount the RelatedMail disk image.
Drag RelatedMail.mailbundle to ~/Library/Mail/Bundles ("~"means a user's home directory). You might need to create the Bundles folder if it does not already exist.
If you have never used another Mail bundle, you will need to run the following two commands in the Terminal application:

defaults write com.apple.mail EnableBundles -bool true
defaults write com.apple.mail BundleCompatibilityVersion 3

Launch the Mail application, and look for the Show Related Messages menu item in the View menu.
Indexing will take a while. During indexing only messages that have been indexed will appear as related messages.

RelatedMail creates the following directories when run: ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere, ~/Library/Logs/Pertinere, and ~/Library/Caches/Pertinere. It does not modify your mail files in any way. So to uninstall just remove ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere, ~/Library/Logs/Pertinere, and ~/Library/Mail/Bundles/RelatedMail.mailbundle

Explanation

The RelatedMessages plugin builds an index, similar to Spotlight, of all your mail files, and uses that index to find messages related to the currently viewed message. The plugin determines relevance by looking at both the headers and the contents of the message. A given item in the related messages list shows the sender, date, subject, and first sentence or two from the message. Above the item is a score indicator &ndash the longer the bar the more relevant the message. Various styles are applied to the text to indicate a particular relation to the currently viewed message.

Item Styles
Sender Black: same sender as current message
Gray: different sender as current message
Italic: sent from self

Date Black: sent after current message
Gray: sent before current message

Subject Bold: same subject as current message (and may be truncated)

The subject is a link to open the message in a new viewer window. Command clicking on that link will open the message in the current Viewer. You can change the ordering of the related messages by right clicking anywhere in the related messages text area.

Item	Styles
Sender	Black: same sender as current message Gray: different sender as current message Italic: sent from self
Date	Black: sent after current message Gray: sent before current message
Subject	Bold: same subject as current message (and may be truncated)

A few graphics are reused from Mail (sometimes flipped or rotated):

Graphic Meaning
reply Message is a reply to the current message

reply Current message is a reply to the message

reference source Current message refers to the message

Message refers to the current message

The number of messages from a given thread is limited, so that one thread does not dominate the results. Mail already has tools for viewing all the messages in a given thread, I do not want to duplicate that. RelatedMail has not been extensively tuned for RSS messages but it does a decent job there as well.

Graphic	Meaning
	Message is a reply to the current message
	Current message is a reply to the message
	Current message refers to the message
	Message refers to the current message

Known Issues

Indexing takes time and is very disk and cpu intensive. Laptop users beware. At the moment, there is no visual indication of progress.
RelatedMail will slightly slow down starting and quitting Mail. How quickly the list of related messages appears depends on the speed of your machine. I am always working on improving performance.
A preferences panel is being worked on. For now you have to edit the Info.plist file inside the plugin bundle. Most items are fairly self explanatory. If you are not comfortable editing these files wait until the GUI prefs are finished.
There are sometimes graphics glitches during resizing.
Having the RelatedMail panel showing next to the MailTags panel can cause some graphics problems. For best results, show the MailTags panel after the RelatedMail panel. I'm working on fixing this issue.
Occasionally, command-clicking on a mail link will not do anything.
Sorting is hidden in the contextual menu. I'm working on a better UI for that.
Running more than one copy of mail at a time (for a given user) will cause big problems. Don't try this.
Lack of localization to non US / non English
If you need to rebuild your ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index file, disable the related mail plugin before you do so, and delete ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere before reenabling the plugin. So the sequence would be: move plugin out of Bundles directory, delete ~/Library/Mail/Envelope Index and ~/Library/Mail/Pertinere, start Mail and let it rebuild its index, quit mail, reenable plugin, and start Mail again.

Acknowledgments

Installation instructions were adapted from Attachment Scanner Plugin and MailFollowUp.
Thanks to James Eagan's notes on writing mail plugins for a place to start.
Here is a nice list of other Mail plugins, and another list

Feedback

Comments are welcome.