It seems there are many more readers of blogs than there are writers and everyone has email these days but relatively few people use RSS aggregators; so having a bridge to email so folks can keep in touch with RSS feeds makes lots of sense.

Then if we have an RSS to email gateway we can run ZOË off it to search & sort blogs.

I guess users might want different kinds of email feed;

• 1 email for all Java blogs per day
• 1 email per day per feed that they are interested in (so thats like each RSS feed being its own email list with daily digest
• 1 email per hour of whats new
• 1 email per change per RSS feed

Still from a basic RSS to email feed it should be pretty easy to do.

[James Strachan’s Radio Weblog]

I have several email addresses, most of which end up in different folders of the same mail program. Something like ZOË should mean that I can forget about that sort of detail upfront, and simply slice my data dyamically. The same applies to all the other attributes. Read/Unread, From, To, Subject etc. They’re all sources of metadata that I can use to organise my messages. Being able to index message bodies is very cool, as would being able to add my own keywords for easy retrieval later. Queries like ‘find me all the emails from James about Jelly that I have tagged as interesting’ should then be possible. Email folders would (hopefully) become redundant, or at least, dynamically generated on the fly in response to ad-hoc queries.

Its all about context. Data without a context is data without meaning.