I just spent some very long period of time getting Zoë totally set up on my machine. Tagline: ‘Zoë does for your email what google does for the web.’ Basically it’s this Java program/service (yeah, I sort of recoil at the Java part, also) which hangs out on your machine sorts/indexes all your mail, parses it out, and presents a web interface for dealing with the information. Like gmail, kinda, but local. And a little bit better - instead of tags (which I sort of feel are a little overrated), the basic mechanism is this: you do a search. It then presents you with a page with: a listing of all the messages that have to do with that search, a list of all the people who are the senders/recipients of those messages, a list of any attachments to any of those messages, and a list of any links contained in any of those messages. It’s actually pretty nifty.
The whole thing’s not exactly foolproof yet, but it’s stable. Right now I have it pulling and pushing all my mail - that is, it periodically checks gmail, and runs a pop server which Mail.app pulls from, and it also runs a local smtp server that relays all the mail sent by Mail.app. That way sending/receiving mail is pretty much exactly like it was before, but Zoë also indexes every message that goes in or out.
I think this is a pretty rad set-up I think it’d be even radder for someone who really deals with a buttload of mail every day, because I know I’m not that person.
Post a Comment