Heading for that sea-port town called Candee-i-o
October 17th, 2004, By Duncan Gough
// Wikemail
Inspired by Stef’s wikification of news.bbc.co.uk, and having started to use dokuwiki for all my brain-storming. Realising that I could use it to keep a web-based, searchable archive of my email I wrote a simple little Python script that checks my IMAP mailbox and ports all new messages into a namespace aware section of dokuwiki. Namespaces, plain-text, wiki, email. I’m happy. The only thing left to do is parse the message body and wikify all the proper nouns so that my email comes to life, hyper-linked, document-aware.
Since dokuwiki is purely file based, no database required, the I have robust backup of my mail. As has been noted before, by Harry Fuecks and Danny O’Brien, geeks trust plain text/simple apps, so having my ‘brains’ and my email stored in plaintext, as easy to backup as ‘cp’ or ‘tar’, makes me feel much happier.
Whilst I’m on the subject of wiki’s, MediaWiki is an especially nice piece of software that runs wikipedia and appears to a shy but rather talented advertisment for PHP’s ability to handle ‘enterprise’ applications.
– http://www.nicjones.net/biog.htm