Yesterday’s comments were spare and unclear: I could blame this hellish cold, but anyone reading the other entries here will wonder what my excuse is for those.
So I have thought about Zoë and what it might mean, with the aid of store-brand TheraFlu. I like the possibilities it offers for seeing your email as another kind of content that you can navigate non-linearly. I like how it pulls out information like contributors’ names, mailing list names, threads. It views email as an organic, unending thing, as opposed to a bunch of separate artifacts.
It eschews filters, which I’m not sure I like. I think we all get some email (perhaps administrative mail from some process or updates from services) which we filter out of our inbox: Zoë doesn’t support that.
I haven’t lived in it yet, so I can’t say anything about stability, but it is an early release (version 0.2.2).
Added benefit: take the rdf file that Zoë creates and let NetNewsWire handle it for you.
The whole shebang is licensable under Apple’s Apple Public Source License version 1.2. I am not a lawyer, so I won’t presume to know more than where to find it, but even if the terms are not as unencumbered as the BSD and GNU licences, sorta free is a good start. I’m not seeing that kind of openness from The Leading Brand. Their notion of licensing is a little different.