Zoë : Turning your computer into a mini-search server

Sounds bland, doesn't it?? Well, it's not really. Earlier I posted about the latest generation of personal search tools like Google Deskbar and MSN Deskbar. Similar to this, yet in many ways a different take on this is Zoë. Zoë has been around for a long time, since 2002, so its a bit of an old timer. The current version is 0.6.2. In its default installation, Zoë acts like an email client - downloading your email and indexing it. The interface is a web browser and you're shown the mail dated for Today as the start point. Then you can switch days, or search for particular terms and it displays only those email that qualify. The messages can be sorted by date or sender or subject. And along the side bar Zoë creates direct links to the attachments (if any) in your email and creates a list of senders for quick retrieval of all messages from a particular person. That's neat. For another opinion on how neat Zoë can be, read Jon Udell's review at O'Reilly Network.

Beyond the basic configuration, if you want, you can configure Zoë to be an email server. Thus you continue to use your normal email client, but Zoë sits in the middle - takes a copy of each inbound and outbound message to work its magic - and sends the message onto its final destination.

This is a nice bit of code - all in Java, by the way, so its cross-platform - and it really works well. I have it on my iBook and find it very useful. Try it. You may like it.