Personal email storage
I've always wanted to be able to organize all of my archived email in a more flexible system than the hierarchical folders that most mail clients use by default. A few days ago I mentioned a system called EVM, which is a potential solution. I may make the effort to try it out, but in the meantime, I'm finally looking around to see if other similar solutions are already out there.
What I really want is to be able to assign multiple categories to an arbitrary email message, and then be able to browse my archived (sent and received) email by those categories. I would probably want default categories based on sender or recipient, as well as custom, subject-based categories. For example, I would like to be able to browse all messages related to project X, regardless of who sent them, but also be able to browse all messages from Joe. A message sent by Joe regarding project X should be visible in both lists, but I don't want to have to manually save a copy of that email in multiple folders. I am assuming that the simplest solution would be to store all of the email in a big pile of some sort, and have a mechanism for searching that pile and assigning categories based on the search results. I think this is somewhat similar to what Google is doing with their new email service, though the first example of this idea that I'm aware of comes from the virtual folders (or saved searches) ideas that I think was pioneered in KMail.
Either there really aren't solutions out there, or else this is a harder item to search for than I'm used to. When I first saw EVM, I did a few brief google searches and then I skimmed through dmoz.org and sourceforge to see if I could find anything. Today, I did some more intensive google searching and I'm still having a hard time finding anything relevant. Searching for 'virtual folders email' actually turns up some interesting stuff, and I'm reminded about OASF's Chandler
but that isn't ready for prime time.
If anybody out there knows of some cool email software, let me know!