I’ll be starting my internment internship on Tuesday, writing an extension for Thunderbird. Given that I have ten weeks, full time, to develop this you can imagine that it’s a rather… complicated extension. It will allow Thunderbird to figure out which of your emails are related to each other, and what those relationships are.
A few weeks ago I bid on an item on eBay and won the auction. This involved six emails: confirmation of the bid, notification that I won, an invoice, a receipt from PayPal, a "thank you" from the seller, and a notification of dispatch. My email client had no clue that these six emails related to the same transaction, but in future hopefully it will. That’s what we’re working on this summer. The real cutting edge research is done (and published); I’m just there to put it into human-useable form by incorporating it into a real email client.
And just in case I forget, I’m going to need some resources: