RelatedMail: The Semantic Web comes to Mail
Remember the “Semantic Web” (Wikipedia 
if not)? It sprang out of Tim Berners-Lee’s vision of a web that was smarter about sifting, analysing and relating the explosion of information fostered by the Internet. It sounds full of almost mystical promise (as Berners-Lee puts it):
I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics – everything rippling and folding and looking misty – on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.
While we are waiting for this to arrive in all its fullness, Scott Ziegler is working on a nifty little plug-in for Mail.app that analyses the headers and body of emails in order to list emails related to any selected message.
It lists them in a pane on the side of Mail.app’s interface:
Messages are listed by relevance. Clicking on the subject line of each one opens the email in a new window. In the screenshot above you can see RelatedMail listing other emails I have received on the topic of the email highlighted in the Message List — converting paragraphs into bullet lists in Mail.app. It does a pretty good job.
Related mail does this by creating a database all of its own inside your Mail folder (which takes a bit of time and uses up a bit of disk space):
The pane can be opened and closed by selecting its “Show/Hide Related Messages” option in Mail’s View menu.
Scott says upfront that the plugin is still in development and lists a series of known issues with the current build on his web site which also contains handy instructions on installing and removing the plugin and explains the colour-coding and formatting used in the pane to indicate various categories of relatedness.
It’s fun to play around with. It’s useful too. And it’s freeware (at the moment). Get it from Scott’s web site and get a small glimpse into the future of the Semantic Web.
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Tags: berners-lee, mail.app apple mail, plugins, Productivity, related email, semantic web
June 3rd, 2008 at 7:50 pm
[...] emails related to any selected message. It lists them in a pane on the side of Mail.app??s interfacehttp://www.hawkwings.net/2008/06/02/relatedmail-the-semantic-web-comes-to-mail/Easy Message – the ultra-lite instant messenger for MSN, AOL, ICQ …The most efficient unified [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 1:47 am
Ugh. I installed this and Mailbadge and about a day later, Mail claimed an crash corrupted my database. (This is the more likely suspect methinks.) Now it crashes consistently trying to import my 213,992 messages. No me gusta.
(Otherwise, the related functionality worked well and was quite useful in one day of testing.)
June 4th, 2008 at 5:31 am
[...] Hawk Wings] addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fapple.cooone.com%2Frelatedmail-plugin-for-mailapp%2F’; addthis_title [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 6:04 am
[...] interesting idea that shows a lot of promise.RelatedMail is a free download from Scott Ziegler.[via Hawk Wings]Read | Permalink | Email [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 6:17 am
[...] interesting idea that shows a lot of promise.RelatedMail is a free download from Scott Ziegler.[via Hawk Wings]Read | Permalink | Email [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 7:03 am
RelatedMail: Plugin zeigt zugehörige E-Mails in Mail.app…
Das Plugin legt dafür einen Index aller in Mail.app aufbewahrten E-Mails an und versucht über Header sowie Inhalt jeweils die Verbindung zu der ausgewählten E-Mail (funktioniert auch mit den in Mail.app eventuell abonnierten RSS-Feeds) zu finden.
…
June 4th, 2008 at 7:06 am
[...] [via Hawk Wings] [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 7:22 am
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June 4th, 2008 at 8:34 am
[...] Microsoft Outlook users have Xobni, and now Mac Mail users get the RelatedMail plug-in for Mail.app, which displays a list of messages like the one you’re reading. RelatedMail takes quite a bit of time to complete its initial index, and it’s still in beta, but still looks like a promising way to smarten up your inbox. [via] [...]
June 4th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
[...] plugin Jun 2008 04 Let’s make it a productivity week. tuaw resp. Hawk Wings just spit out “Related Mail”, a very useful extension for Apples build-in Mail [...]
June 6th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
be warned: this plugins crashes may Mail Database once a day. But it is a nice and promising concept.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:23 am
0.8.2 fixes that bug. See the website…
October 11th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
This is an absolutely brilliant plugin and it works like a charm – but not on Snow Leopard. Is there any chance of an update?