I'm a self-represented litigant. Before CaseRelief could do any of this, I put my email exhibits together by hand. It went roughly like this.
All my email with one person ended up in one long text file in date order. That part was fine. Getting anything useful out of it was the problem. I'd find an email I needed, pull it out into its own file and name it with the date and a few words about what it was, so I could find it again. I ended up with a few throwaway scripts to do the pulling out.
Then the exhibits. I lettered them and kept a separate list of what each letter was. If an exhibit had a few parts, I merged the PDFs into one. Copies ended up in different folders, and at least once I renamed a file just so I'd stop grabbing the wrong version. And the next filing came along and used the same letters for different documents.
None of it was hard, just slow, and with copies sitting in different places it was easy to grab the wrong one.
Today, I sat down to design the part of CaseRelief that does this.
After you filter your email you get a list of everything that matched. Each email has a checkbox next to its number, and you tick the ones you want. My first version had a select mode you had to turn on first, and it was confusing. I couldn't tell if I was in the mode or not. So I got rid of it and now the boxes are always there.
Long emails were a problem too. You scroll through a long one and lose track of which email you're even in. So there's a bar that stays at the top while you scroll now, with the number of the email you're on and its own checkbox.
Links got hidden. Emails are full of long tracking links and they're almost never relevant to an exhibit, so by default they show up as a small link marker. There's a switch to show them for the odd time you need one. They're still in the data either way.
Then the bigger question. What if you want exhibits from two different email accounts? Say 10 from one and 5 from the other, and you want all 15 together for one filing. Anything you send over, from any account or file, goes into one pool. That part's working. Next come binders. From the pool you'll make binders, one per filing or however you want to split it up, and the same email can be in more than one binder.
Each binder will number its own exhibits, so the same email can be Exhibit 3 in one binder and Exhibit A in another. That one came straight from the reused letters in my own folders.
For the look, I want it to be like when you print an email to PDF from Gmail or Outlook. From, To, CC, date and subject at the top, then the email, a spot for the exhibit label, and a line at the bottom saying it was extracted with CaseRelief, from which account or file, and when. The goal after that is for a binder to number its exhibits, make a cover index, and export the whole thing as one PDF with each exhibit on its own page. If that works, the cover index replaces the list I used to keep by hand, and the export replaces all the merging.
If you're still doing this by hand, two things helped me. Name every file with the date and what it is, and don't ever edit the originals. Keep them as they came and work on copies.
– M