It's not a bug, it's a feature: Carolin Horn has designed Anymails, which represents your email messages and folders as micro-organisms. The morphology of the individual organisms and their behaviour within colonies imparts information about the state of your email. You can view QT movies of the application in action (1, 2), download her thesis, and download the Anymails code itself. See some of her other work here (predominantly in German). via Madame Martin, the "French Metafilter".
posted on Aug 31, 2007 - View this thread

Distributed spam filtering. Sure, your spam filter may be hot stuff, but Spamnet takes filtering to the communal level. With its easy install, point and click simplicity, and Outlook support could Spamnet be the SpamCop for the masses?
posted on Dec 19, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Oct 9, 2002 - View this thread

"Moodwatch" now in Eudora 5.0 "Moodwatch" is, apparantly, something that "watches" for offensive language in your e-mail and then rates your mail accordingly.

According to Eudora, "MoodWatch can detect aggressive, demeaning or rude language in the email you send and receive by looking at both individual words and complete phrases."

I find this to be pretty disturbing. Okay, so right now it can't be used to censor, and right now it can be turned off. But suppose, at some point in the future, it can be used to censor, it's on all the time, and your employer is monitoring the content of everyone's mail to ensure that no one's offending anyone else?

And who decided on the standard for offensiveness to begin with? If you look in their example, use of the phrase "what are you thinking?" was enough to get the highest "offensiveness" rating. What the fuck??!!

Oh, damn. There's those three chillis.
posted on Sep 12, 2000 - View this thread

"A unique little pet that lives in your e-mail software." Asking for trouble?
posted on Sep 4, 2000 - View this thread

Nannybots and mailing lists don't mix - especially nannybots that have gone insane!
posted on Mar 3, 2000 - View this thread