A method comprising: receiving information identifying a plurality of message recipients to whom electronic messages are to be communicated; analyzing a social graph to identify a plurality of connection paths , each individual connection path connecting a first entity associated with a message sender with one of the plurality of message recipients, the social graph represented by a graph data structure having nodes representing various entities and edges representing associations between entities, with the first entity and each of the message recipients represented as nodes in the graph data structure , each edge connecting two nodes included in a connection path assigned an edge score representing an estimated strength of connection between two entities represented by the two nodes ; deriving a path score for each of the plurality of connection paths connecting a first node representing the first entity with a second node representing a message recipient by aggregating edge scores of the edges in each individual connection path; applying at least one user-specified filter criterion to the plurality of connection paths to filter the plurality of connection paths, the at least one user-specified filter criterion comprising at least one of: a particular entity, a particular entity type, or a specific edge type; generating a visual representation of at least one of the plurality of filtered connection paths satisfying the applied at least one filter criterion, the at least one filtered connection path connecting the first node representing the first entity with the second node representing the message recipient; and generating a plurality of customized instances of an electronic message by automatically modifying a generic electronic message to include information identifying one or more entities to which the first entity and an individual message recipient are both related, as determined by the analysis of the social graph . receiving information identifying a plurality of message recipients to whom electronic messages are to be communicated; analyzing a social graph to identify a plurality of connection paths , each individual connection path connecting a first entity associated with a message sender with one of the plurality of message recipients, the social graph represented by a graph data structure having nodes representing various entities and edges representing associations between entities, with the first entity and each of the message recipients represented as nodes in the graph data structure , each edge connecting two nodes included in a connection path assigned an edge score representing an estimated strength of connection between two entities represented by the two nodes ; deriving a path score for each of the plurality of connection paths connecting a first node representing the first entity with a second node representing a message recipient by aggregating edge scores of the edges in each individual connection path; applying at least one user-specified filter criterion to the plurality of connection paths to filter the plurality of connection paths, the at least one user-specified filter criterion comprising at least one of: a particular entity, a particular entity type, or a specific edge type; generating a visual representation of at least one of the plurality of filtered connection paths satisfying the applied at least one filter criterion, the at least one filtered connection path connecting the first node representing the first entity with the second node representing the message recipient; and generating a plurality of customized instances of an electronic message by automatically modifying a generic electronic message to include information identifying one or more entities to which the first entity and an individual message recipient are both related, as determined by the analysis of the social graph . <EOS>