CouchMail

Inspiration

Emails are still hard to find...after all these years.

What it does

Offers new ways to find your email.

How I built it

CouchMail uses a small Python script which uses the Context.IO REST API to import emails into Apache CouchDB or IBM's Cloudant. Once the messages are in the database, they can be browsed by date (current) and are indexed by data, subject, who they're to, who sent them, who was CC'd, and (if you're using Cloudant) for full text search.

Additionally, the full source of the email is kept (as an "attachment" in the original format) for use in legal matters where the original message (with all it's headers, etc) is required for validation.

Challenges I ran into

Time. There's never enough of the stuff.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The Context.IO script took about 2 hours to write and most of that was learning which endpoints to use.

What I learned

The Context.IO REST API.

What's next for CouchMail

More UI! I'd like to browse my email archive by people's faces, places mentioned in the emails, semantic data (stored in schema.org actions, etc), and by tags, annotations, and notes I plan to provide via the UI on top of the emails I've archived. Think note taking, meets email.