Mining the Social Web

Closing Remarks

We’ve covered a lot of ground in this chapter, but we’ve just barely begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible with mail data. Our focus has been on mboxes, a simple and convenient file format that lends itself to high portability and easy analysis by many Python tools and packages. There’s an incredible amount of open source technology available for mining mboxes, and Python is a terrific language for slicing and dicing them. A small investment in these tools and stores such as CouchDB, which lends itself to easily sharing your data, can go a long way.