ZOË

I've just got round to giving ZOË a spin. ZOË is an email tool which mixes elements of client, server, and search engine. It uses the Apache Lucene search engine to do full text indexing on all (incoming and outgoing) email, embeds a web server to provide its user interface through a browser, provides embedded pop, smtp, and ftp servers to enable other apps to treat it as a proxy server (so for example, email written in a "normal" email client can be routed through ZOË for archiving and indexing).

In general, I'm impressed. I'm increasingly sold on the local web server + browser as UI combination in any case, but this is a neat demonstration of some of its strengths. Sender names, domains, and dates are all links to views of matching email. In a list of emails (the results of some search) down the right of the page are lists including the union of the correspondents involved in all of the email conversations listed, all the documents attachmed to the emails listed, any mailing lists which listed emails are from, links found in those emails; these give rapid access to information which could well be what a search was looking for.

Searches themselves are, of course, fast — that's the point of having a search engine in there. I'm convinced that having that sort of performance in search mode available will, when it eventually becomes standard, change the way we approach email management. Same goes for files on hard drives. The creators of ZOË are pretty explicit about this; they point out that bookmarks lost a lot of value when Google came along. Why bookmark (and then suffer the problems of managing a bookmark collection) when you can find something in seconds using Google? Likewise why set up elaborate filters and complex folder structures when search can take you to the email you want in seconds?

The big complaint is that it keeps crashing on me with a

Fatal: Stack size too small.

message. Not being a Java head, I have no idea what a reasonable stack size is. I've tried up to 100Mb, and it still crashes.

Another shortcoming is that with all this support for ad hoc searching, there is no support for explicit organisation of email. While I'll bore anyone who shows any signs of interest stupid with rants about the uselessness of hierarchical folders as an information organisation paradigm, in relying entirely on search it seems to me that the baby has been lost with the bathwater. On the other hand, because ZOË uses the web browser as UI, and because it provides all of its views with proper URIs (I'm presuming that they are stable) all of that organisation could potentially be provided by an entirely independent layer of software.

Oh, and I haven't tried using it as an email composer.

Another tool of interest is Docco, a "personal document management system" which combines indexing (Lucene again) of local drives and Formal Concept Analysis visualisation. It'll go inside OpenOffice, Word, Excel, PDF documents, so this could be ideal for finding those papers I know I have somewhere. Again, it provides the search side. I still need to be able to save things using some simple scheme (/papers/year/month/author or some such) and layer metadata on top.

Comments

[Kalou]

Hi MishMash,

I'm using Zoe 0.6 here (just upgraded changing only the binaries and restarted java),

with -Xss20m and it works like a charm.

Hope this helps.

You might subscribe to the users mailing list, to have help if you're still in strouble.

Thanks for Docco, seems to be a great tool. Testing right now !

Cheers ;-)