I am humbled, and impressed. Humbled by once again realising how much I don’t know, and impressed by how much others do, and how important human interaction is in what we do.

In one single comment, Chris has pointed me to at least three java related email projects I somehow managed to miss. I’d heard of ICEMail already, but forgot to mention it.

Must brush up on my google terms – its too easy to artificially narrow the criteria and not get what you were after. Google should just know what I want, not what I say I want!

So what do I want? Its more than just a mail reader. I have a ‘too many email addresses’ issue. I have several personal ones and a work one. I want to be able to aggregate all my personal ones and read them at work and at home. I want emails I write to be stored centrally, irrespective of where I am when I write them. At home I use WindowsXP for most things, and FreeBSD for everything else. Part of the ‘everything else’ includes my email. But I don’t want to have to switch chairs just to write an email. Fetchmail, Procmail and Mutt form a powerful triumvirate, and I can still fire up KMail if I feel like it and have it work. What I’d love is to have something like KMail as a cross-platform remote client, so I could use a nice GUI from wherever I can get a net connection, without having to lug my entire email directory around with me. It would have to be client-server. I don’t want to try and rethread a 15,000 message folder back and forth over the net. The server should do that and just show me the results.

The other thing I want (don’t ask much do I?) is actually where I started. The concept of a smart mail reader that is also a newsgroup, web page, rss, etc. aggregator that can index all my stuff and show me the relationships between things, sort of like ZOË taken to its logical extreme.

Then I just have the problem of what to do after breakfast… 🙂