Research

What people actually do with message screenshots

Almost nothing is published about how ordinary people gather, organise and hand over text messages when something goes wrong. We are collecting that picture in the open, and this page will hold the results as they land rather than a marketing summary of them.

Why we have no numbers on this page yet

Because we do not have honest ones. ThreadProof processes screenshots in the browser, so we cannot count what is inside anyone's packet even if we wanted to, and we will not publish an invented statistic to make a page look authoritative. What appears here will come from a voluntary survey with a stated sample size and a published question set.

The questions we are asking

What triggers someone to start screenshotting a conversation, and how long after the first bad message?
How do people get screenshots off a phone, and where do they get stuck?
What do recipients (lawyers, HR, adjusters, letting agents) most often send back for rework?
What do people redact, and what do they forget to redact?
How many separate conversations end up in one dispute?
What proportion of threads are long enough that stitching changes the page count materially?

Method

Voluntary survey, no incentive payment, open to users and non-users.
No screenshots or message text are collected. Free-text answers only, which we redact before analysis.
Sample size, question wording and dates published alongside every figure.
Aggregates only. Nothing is reported for a group small enough to identify a person.
We will publish results that are inconvenient for us, including where people preferred a free alternative.

Take part

Email abe.mainlinesites@gmail.com with "research" in the subject and we will send the current question set. Practitioners who receive evidence from clients are especially useful to us: you see the mistakes at scale.

Citing us

Cite as: ThreadProof, Message screenshot evidence practices, threadproof.app/research, with the access date. Every figure we publish will carry its own sample size. If a number on this site is not attached to a sample size, treat it as an estimate and ask us.