Zoë

With today’s WiFi enabled world it’s pretty rare, but every now and then I find myself in a situation where getting my email isn’t easy (in other words, I don’t have my laptop with me). Most ISP’s offer some kind of web-based mail, but quite a few do not. In my case, I run my own OS/X server so it’s a solution I need to solve myself.

OS/X Server comes with a great, fully functional web mail configuration. So what am I complaining about, right? Unfortunately, while I have to agree that SquirrelMail is very good, it’s not what I’m looking for — I want something a bit more like Mail.app. That would be Zoë. Zoë is so unlike traditional web mail tools you might actually consider using it alongside Mail.app:

The goal here is to do for email (starting with your personal mailbox) what Google did for the web… The Google principle: It doesn’t matter where information is because I can get to it with a keystroke. So what is Zoë? Think about it as a sort of librarian, tirelessly, continuously, processing, slicing, indexing, organizing, your messages. The end result is this intertwingled web of information. Messages put in context. Your very own knowledge base accessible at your fingertip.

The difference is very compelling. Much like Mail.app, even more so, Zoë has done away with folders, unread mail and inboxes — it’s a clean interface to quickly find your mail, and what’s related to your mail.

This is what I’m looking for when I’m away from my desk. A means to search through mail that’s just as powerful as Mail.app and Spotlight, but web-based. I can’t imagine a better web interface to my mail.

Zoë is a Java application — giving it a dry run is as easy as downloading it, unzipping and typing java -jar Zoe.jar. Or, if you’re looking for something a little bit more hands off, take a look at Zoë Professional.

One word of caution, though. Zoë does not have built-in security or encryption. You’ve got to provide that yourself. In my case, it was easy to set up an Apache proxy that handles securing access and passes the rest through to Zoë. This is the preferred approach, at least in my mind — Apache does great security, and I don’t want to open up yet another port on my server.