The invention provides the user of a unified messaging mailbox with efficient, intelligent, media and device sensitive methods and apparatus to access and process (e.g., read, listen, forward, and search) messages. The invention introduces media conversion capabilities to selectively treat multimedia messages and message attachments so that they can be efficiently handled by mobile devices like PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), pagers, or phone devices (with or without a text display feature). Furthermore, the invention introduces message content analysis capabilities that will recognize linguistic relationships between messages regardless of the media type. The invention also describes the ability to present these linguistic relationships along with the standard messaging relationships (Message arrival time, subject, sender, etc.). Still further, the invention introduces a message referencing option that allows simpler message selection from certain devices.