Searching E-mail in Kiwi
Published January 12th, 2006 in KiwiIn Kiwi, the plan is to have very extensive support for searching e-mail. I think archiving e-mail and search are the two areas that are really going to make Kiwi shine. First off, we are going to support two different kinds of searching: server side and local. IMAP allows server side searches where the server returns the results to you. This is particulary nice for searching the bodies of messages that you have yet to download, like for a mailing list. On top of that we are going to have a more powerful and flexible local search that searches your database of e-mail. This is one of the many reasons I decided to go with CoreData as the data store for Kiwi. Since CoreData sits right on top of SQLlite, Kiwi will have power of a relational database sitting underneath which will provide for complex queries.
Hi!
Will you handle searching encrypted messages? A lot of my business emails are encrypted, and being able to search them is critical.
I’m really looking forward to a new, better email client than Mail.app. It sucks in so many ways. I really hope that you can finish your app and shine over competition.
All this sounds very promising! I assume Kiwi will be unicode, or not? It will support different keyboards?
I have a question…
My biggest problem with mail clients, since I left pine behind, has been that I don’t have a really easy way to sort messages by sender or some group affiliation.
In pine, it was like 2 keystrokes. in Mail.app, it’s make a directory for the person/group, drag each message there -OR- there’s a keyb shortcut for moving messages to the last folder a message was moved to…
I really want it to automatically create directories for me, by sender (unless I’m the sender in bcc’d messages, in which I want it to be the receiver), and allow me to make special case rules for moving messages to specialized folders when I don’t want it filed by sender.
I’m really excited about what I’ve read about Kiwi, so far. I just wonder where you are on message filing.
Initially we will not be supporting encrypted e-mail, right now we have enough on our plate to keep us busy. Hopefully in the future we can try and address some of these features. Yes, we should support unicode but it’s possible our initial betas won’t be 100% compliant. And in regards to filters, we are not going to have the standard e-mail filtering system. We are going to have actions/filters that you can execute on demand that will filter e-mail based off of small scripts.
That actually sounds exactly like what I want. The auto-filtering in Mail works for certain things—mainly sorting incoming email by broad categories into separate inboxes for separate purposes—but what I really want is flexible filing.
I read an email, hit a key or two, and it leaves my inbox for somewhere I can find it again if I need it. that’s key. usually this is by sender/receiver, but it won’t always be.
how about some kind of system for having an email listed in multiple different folders? Say, for example, I want to file it by who sent it to me, but it includes info related to a project that I have a folder for…
I’m really looking forward to trying Kiwi out!!
Yes, that is exactly how we are going to be doing filters. You can assign key strokes to filters or bring up the actions menu and easily run the filters/actions you’ve built. Also, in regards to having e-mails in multiple folders, yes we are going to have something similiar. I think the more ways you can access your information the better, so we are going to have three main levels: folders, tags and searches. Tags are going to work similiar to how Flickr and del.icio.us work. You can add as many tags as you like to a particular email. So you can put it in your archive folder and add the tags “john, project x” and then you can retrieve stuff easily that have those tags.
I like the filtering idea. Somehow it also makes me wonder whether Kiwi could emulate the classifying suggestions which DEVONthink brings up: in that way it would be very easy to classify emails.
So something like Smart Folders that use scripts to sort mail into them. I like the feature in Apple mail, but it’s so limited. I have problems trying to get all the mail that I want into the folder. Stuff like “All mail for the last 30 days from Joe but not if CCed to support”.
How will Kiwi deal with different accounts? Whilst distinct folders for different accounts may be preferable for some purposes, I usually prefer to filter all emails into one set of folders for every account I use.
Smolk, in fact e-mail classification is an area I would eventually like to get into. In the past I have experimented with some algorithms to classify documents, first we need to build up a base to work off of however.
Also, in regards to dealing with different accounts something akin to smartfolders will work. I’ll write more in the future when I have more details.