In my last post, 12 Years of Gmail, Part 4: Chat, I included eight Plotly graphs on a single page. All the graphs worked correctly, but the page was taking almost four seconds to render any content at all and up to 6-8 seconds to load completely without cached elements. By contrast, the landing page of chrxs.net takes less than a second to load with visual content rendering almost immediately. The site is intentionally designed to be light weight and uses very few resources on a standard load. But Plotly graphs require a big (1MB+ uncompressed) JavaScript file in order to load with all the bells and whistles. What can be done to improve this slow load time, particularly when many graphs are on a single page?

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With the Finishing Touches in place, it's finally time to start looking at some of the data in my Google Takeout Mail export file. What better to start with than the Google Talk (or Google Chat, as I will refer to it) content stored within!

I am starting with Chat because I was surprised to find it all stored in the export file. It makes sense as chat history is accessible from the Chats link in the old Gmail interface (I couldn't find an equivalent in Inbox). My surprise led to curiosity and my curiosity led to obsession with trying to figure how the Chat data is stored and what information each messages contains. It turns out there are quite a few things that can be gleaned from these chat messages -

• Chat vs. Email Usage
• Chat vs. Email Usage (Cumulative)
• Top 10 Chatters
• Chat Clients
• Chat Times
• Chat (vs. Email) Days
• Chat Durations
• Chat Thread Sizes

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After spending last week Bootstrapping things and, somewhat related, working my way around Pelican, today I have tried to tie up loose ends so I can start spending more time thinking about what information I can get from all this data. While the package is far from complete, these "finishing touches" ended up being the three themes of this morning's work -

1. Implementing a settings file
2. Customising Plotly graphs
3. Generating random names

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Jumping back in to Python has been just as fun as my first experiences with it. After brushing off some of the dust, I have managed to put together a (very) small package that does a couple of basic things with a Google Takeout Mail (mbox) file:

1. Parses and standardizes the format of email addresses;
2. Imports key messages data in to an sqlite database;
3. Produces simple graphs of top recipients and senders.

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I have been slowly migrating off of a Gmail email address for a couple of months now - I established this domain, selected an email provider, set up SPF, DMARC, etc. and finally created myself a new email address. I updated the address in all of the obvious places, but still found myself using Gmail frequently to keep up. At some point I realized that the only way to finish the migration would be to do something with all the email I had hoarded away in Gmail.

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