I will talk about the classical motion of three charged particles with both attractive and repulsive interactions. The triple collision is a main source of chaos in such three body Coulomb problems. By employing the McGehee scaling technique, it is possible to analyse the three-body dynamics near the triple collision in 3 degrees of freedom in detail. Surprisingly simple dynamical patterns in large parts of the chaotic phase space can be uncovered studying the triple collision manifolds. The underlying degree of order in the form of approximate Markov partitions may help in understanding the global structures observed in quantum spectra of two-electron atoms.