For better or for worse, I have been very fascinated lately with the concept of
intertwingularity.
Searching on Perlmonks reveals very little. One node Managing a Personal Email Archive, and leads to Pronto and Mail::Miner. In fact, searching on intertwingularity also reveals little more than the above, esp. as it relates to Perl.
There are three non-Perl products, and one Perl product -- Zoe, Emila, Six Degrees, and Twingle.com. Each is discussed below briefly --
- Zoe is an opensource, free, gorgeously conceptualized but very frustrating app written in Java, of which I know little unless it is in my morning cup. It is very slow, and particularly with my home-installed Postfix on my iBook, it creates all kinds of goofy links, most of them wrongly dated. Most impt., it doesn't synchronize with my mail store -- it merely imports it, and then you have to live with its import even if your mail store changes.
- Steven Frank's Emila is the same concept in a Cocoa program, also free and opensource, but it is very half-finished. Besides, it is not web based, so it can't be accessed from everywhere.
- Creo's Six Degrees is the best and most polished of them all, but it is not opensource, and it is $99 a seat. Even with their bulk discount, its cost won't be justified by my twinge for intertwingularity.
- Lastly, there is the tantalizingly named, Perl-based Twingle which was once mentioned in a Simon Cozen's article. Alas, I can't get into Twingle. Apparently it is by invite only, and I tried to get an invite, but I guess I was convincing enough. Queries to whether the source for Twingle was available went unanswered, so I guess it is not.
Which brings me here. This is a concept that would be best solved with Perl, with its power of regexp searching, and intergration with DBI. I read Robert Bernier's article
Data Mining Email but it doesn't quite achieve Zoe's concept. Besides, it depends on Postgresql which gives me nervous attacks.
I envision a PerlTwingular app which simply reads the mail store thereby avoiding the problem of maintaining and synchronizing two separate stores, something like Plucene for searching it all (the search index might be re-built as a cron job). The app interface would be very much like Zoe's or Creo Six Degrees'. There might be an optional DBI integration with SQLite. Would be nice to have a built-in webserver, perhaps a pure Perl httpd, so everything standsalone. In any case, it would have to work out of the box with Apache and IIS at the very least.
Phew! Of course, I have the power to envision this, but not more than just a clue to where to start coding. Hence, this final question -- has this been done already? Is there stuff one can look at, study?
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