A little known feature of Gmail is that you can download your entire inbox. Your mail downloads as a “.mbox” file, which you can open in Python with the mailbox package.

This IPython notebook shows you how to download your Gmail inbox, then open it with Python to extract and graph data.

Why do this? One application is if your company has an inbox for support or sales inquiries – it can be valuable to know how its growing and when it peaks.

Here’s a preview from the IPython notebook.