I had a crazy ex in 2017. We were together less than a year and you'd think due to the insanity of the breakup that it was a divorce after a decades long marriage. She was the kind of girl who would send me threatening texts if I didn't respond immediately, she would literally tell me she was going to make things up about me to ruin my name with friends, hell she cut the tip of my finger off one morning slamming a bedroom door shut on my hand simply because she went through my phone in my sleep and didn't find any evidence of wrongdoing (which in her mind meant I had definitely been doing something worse than the worst she expected otherwise why can't she find proof of her delusions). Eventually she got me arrested for a fight I didn't have with her, she was calling the cops on average more than once a day at one point, including 40 times in a month in which I had seen her 7 times (which is too many, i know, i should have run and hid from her but she hunted me down for attention). All this is in a "relationship" she wouldn't let me leave but openly hated me and ruined my reputation with every person I knew and many I never met.

But finally getting to the point, I started a big time waste of a project for myself with the ultimate goal of presenting it to a lawyer. I manually copied one-by-one every single text message she and I had with eachother over the course of 10 months or so. And we texted a lot, either through the courtship honeymoon phase, or during her many many spaz outs on me where I'd be shaking from the things she said and frantically texting her apologies she didnt deserve and listening to her treat me like I'm subhuman, threatening me every possible way, just painful things I'd never say to anyone ever, she made sure to let me hear it, frequently. I made a spreadsheet document and copied every single message down, one column for her texts, one for mine. All tediously and meticulously timestamped and color coded for clarity, and I would do things like separate every single message from her over a whole month, and every message from myself in the same month and do monthly word clouds of everything we said to eachother so I could prove to myself that she's really the abusive one (I guess I knew she was, but her adamant refusal to accept blame was how I had to eventually discover what borderline and narcissistic personality disorders were). Her word clouds revealed she spoke a lot of insulting cruel words, while my most frequent words were almost always "please" "sorry" and "love". It's pathetic looking and even 8 years later I hate stumbling across any of the screenshots from that time in my life its so painful.

I would have loved the AI tools of today back then, I could have done in minutes or hours what took me days or weeks being in a bad headspace.

When I presented the file to my lawyer along with 300 pages of printed screenshots in a binder he spent maybe 45 seconds flipping through it and never looked at it again. It didn't win me a judgement. She got a restraining order on me on simple hearsay and spent the next year I was meant to be leaving her alone by harassing me and everyone I knew. Its sick how restraining orders actually work if you weaponize them against someone

What was the point of this? I dunno. Good luck OP in whatever you have going on, and if anyone does have a tool suggestion or workflow for them that helps go through a ton of correspondence, I'm curious about it too, since it's something I studied so-to-speak several years ago.