October 9, 2002

9:38 AM

Zoë is Google for your inbox (and outbox, too). It's written in Java and actually works on a number of platforms, using a browser-based interface. Jon Udell describes the way he uses Zoë in this O'reilly article.

But be warned: navigating through archived email from five years ago is as humbling as it is addictive.
posted by gdog (12 comments total)

Zoë is a beermat! It keeps drinks cold!

Sorry. My fault, wrong thread.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 9:43 AM on October 9, 2002

hehe...
posted by Steve_at_Linnwood at 10:07 AM on October 9, 2002

The real magic here is actually lucene which is a very cool open source search engine (it would be perfect for the mefi search actually) I've used it in my last three projects, very fast and totally customizable. Doug Cutting who was the head of development at Excite wrote it and its just been pulled into Apaches Jakarta project (which is great times)
posted by zeoslap at 10:11 AM on October 9, 2002

Ah, yes. Remember Lifestreams? Gelernter's other stuff. Not to mention the once-imminent era of the organized and indexed digital life. It seems most reminiscent of jwz's intertwingle.

Or maybe it just brute-forces its way past all that.
posted by dhartung at 1:06 PM on October 9, 2002

With Hotmail's 2MB storage limit (for those of us who still refuse to pay for "free email"), I have trouble keeping messages a month old, let alone five years.
posted by gottabefunky at 1:28 PM on October 9, 2002

gottabefunky, in case you weren't aware, Yahoo Mail gives you 3 times that (6MB)
posted by jaden at 2:13 PM on October 9, 2002

Actually, I believe if you sign up for a new Yahoo! Mail account, you're only allotted 4 mb. Older accounts that signed up when 6 mb was norm have been permitted to keep the larger allowance.
posted by bradlands at 3:00 PM on October 9, 2002

I have 600MB of practically all my e-mail going back eleven years, which might be an interesting challenge for Zoe. (And yes I'm probably weird for keeping it all.)
posted by kerplunk at 3:04 PM on October 9, 2002

Awesome idea. Look forward to getting 10 years of emails in searchable format. For now waiting on a Solaris version. I use email to keep track of a lot of information and need a search interface.
posted by stbalbach at 6:27 PM on October 9, 2002

Wow - I have over 350MB in messages at work (from almost 3 years) and often spent far too much time searching through them, even though they are organised and archived into folders. This is definitely worth looking at and a great link.

Thanks.
posted by dg at 9:46 PM on October 9, 2002

this assumes that your so lame you actually have a desire to keep all your email msgs.
posted by carfilhiot at 4:51 AM on October 10, 2002

I have 600MB of practically all my e-mail going back eleven years, which might be an interesting challenge for Zoe. (And yes I'm probably weird for keeping it all.)

I have 1.2GB of mail, going back a little under a year. In my defense, a lot of this is FreeBSD's cvs-all list, which I'll probably delete. I also have an archive of about 4,500 spam's, which I'm sure will come in handy to train a spam filter one day.

I also have other archives going back even further, but they're on a different machine (my Amiga, no less), but they only contain about 100,000 messages. I had a lot in Thor and Agent too, but both ended up falling over unrecoverably because of their suck-ass binary database format.

I don't index it though; if I did I'd probably use Namazu. Zoë won't get a look in; I don't do Java.
posted by Freaky at 5:38 AM on October 10, 2002