International Journal of Creative Interfaces and Computer Graphics, 1(2), 29-39, July-December 2010 29 Copyright © 2010, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. Keywords: Email, Document Visualization, Magnetism Metaphor, User Interface, Visualization System INTrODuCTION Email is now part of our lives as a communica- tion tool, whether if used in the working place or in the context of personal relationships. It is an efficient, fast and inexpensive mechanism to communicate. The downside of such remark- able success is that it leads to a large amount of data in the email boxes, some of which might be useless from a user’s point of view. Hence, management problems arise when users need to search and to understand the similarity of topics and patterns among email messages. Despite the lack of focus on visualization issues related to email applications, recent examples have shown some effort on adding user-friendly features, namely those related to sorting, filtering and searching messages. Even though, there is a long way to go until we provide users the so much needed help to manage messages conveniently. Most of the current applications are fail- ing on usability because they denote the use of hierarchical folders and also they do return results in a textual or list-based format. Some of them do not even provide proper hints about email similarities or patterns, which can be dramatic when a particular inbox has got a huge collection of messages as it happens in these days. Rather than having some sort of add-ons, users would like to see real changes in the way email usability is delivered. They want to easily navigate across large email col- lections and to infer patterns. As a matter of a fact, proper usability can only be achieved if object manipulation is also considered. A visualization system dealing with a large collection of documents, as it is the case Magnet Mail: A Visualization System for Emails Paulo Castro, CITI-DI, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal Adriano Lopes, CITI-DI, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal AbSTrACT Magnet Mail (MM) is a visualization system for emails based on a zoomable interface and on manipulation of objects. Users are able to search, analyze and understand relations among email messages as long as they provide searching keywords to do so, as well as interact with graphical objects in the display in a pro-active manner. The underlying concept is a magnet metaphor that relates user interaction, searching keywords and relations among emails. In this paper, the authors present a prototype that interacts with a mass-market email system and most of its graphical implementation relies on the Piccolo toolkit. DOI: 10.4018/jcicg.2010070103