(Up to: Functionally Focused Interfaces Ideas AConversation Server )

Hmmm, wouldn't it be cool if you could do this in your e-mail client....

• Add notes, a la Annotea for web pages. Look-up could be done using Message-ID as a hash key, and then several people could even share a note server, for mails sent across mailing lists.
• Similarly, links and URLs could be attached to the mail. (Or just have a URL scraper in the note server.)
• The ability to bring up a list of parent/children/sibling e-mails, but without having to switch to Threaded mode.
• The ability to bring up a list of related e-mails based on sender/recipient, and/or subject matter. This latter would need some kind of keyword/Bayesian filtering logic.
• A queue of e-mails to reply to. These should be references, rather than a separate folder. In fact...
• virtual folders would be cool :)
• A plug-in that parses the currently displayed e-mail and attaches functionality to recognised names, that lets you bring up other information you have on that person, e.g. other e-mails, contact details, webpages, notes, etc etc.
• re-assemble threaded conversations, i.e. be able to associate a section of text within a mail with another mail, or a webpage, or ANY OTHER RESOURCE perhaps.
• using "threaded" mode, attach a mail as a reply to another mail (i.e. append a "references" header, virtually, kind of thing). See Conversation Is AFlow.

Having realised that my mailspace is only one directory above my webspace, and that Perl manipulation of headers and mail format is easy-peasy, here are my projects to work on next:

• Maybe a hierarchical FOAF-based/munged interface, using the folder view to represent people. Message could then be parsed into FOAF RDF files to be presented externally/used as a basis to build some of this site.
• Construct a blog based on the e-mails within a folder. Shoud be quite easy. Maybe some kind of regular archival script to copy existing mails into a different folder, too.
• In an adaptation of Forumzilla [link pending], a script to grab specified xml feeds and put convert them into mailbox format.

(See also: EMail As An Interface )