A pool of messages, e.g., e-mails and/or other electronic documents that each correspond to a communication from a sender to a recipient, is analyzed to identify communication chains between a source and a target. Sender and recipient identifiers extracted from the messages are used to detect communication links between pairs of entities. Indirect chains of any desired length can be found by iteratively tracing a communication path one step forward from the source, then one step backward from the target, and so on; at each new step, entities at end points of the forward paths and backward paths are compared to detect any entities that complete a communication chain from source to target. Information related to the identified communication chains can be presented to a user via an interactive report that supports iterative analysis of the communication-chain data.