There is a simple yet very effective litmus test for outstanding software: if you can’t imagine working without it. Such wonderful pieces of software are rare and their value subjective, but they are, nevertheless, game changing for some people.

David has done it again: it’s called “Seek” and it’s a Thunderbird extension that adds faceted browsing to your email archives.

If you’re like me, you keep your inbox as your todo list and you move processed email into archives. This a very effective way to deal with both information and ‘getting things done’ but has one big drawback: my email archives tend to be a big, messy pile of stuff.

My archives (I call it ‘the vault’) are organized one per year, separated in received or sent. I use another thunderbird extension that maps the “Y” key to the “move the mail from the inbox to the archive” as in “done with it, get it out of my way”. My message-processing task ends when my inbox is fully read and all the messages that don’t require any further action are all archived in the vault.

This system works great (and I’ve been using it for years) but it has one little drawback: there are times when you need a particular information out of your archives and finding it is a major pain. You don’t remember exactly who sent it, nor when, nor the subject line… but you can certainly ‘orient’ yourself between various choices to get to it.

Problem is, email clients don’t generally provide “orienteering” interfaces to your email archives but a simple (or, at best, boolean) search box. Fact is: most of the time I don’t even know what to search for, or the search is so general that the amount of results is still overwhelming (no pagerank for your email, unfortunately, so we are back in altavista days or worse).

And this is where Seek changes the day: faceted browsing is a great way to allow you to ‘orient’ yourself into a pile of semi-structured information when you can’t define exactly (aka write into a text box) what you’re looking for. “I’ll know it when I see it”, it’s generally the feeling that drives me in digging into my email archives and faceted browsing is a tremendous help in that regard.

For SIMILE, we’ve been using and researching ways to apply faceted browsing for the last 4 years and Seek feels completely natural to me, both in the way it works and it the way it helps you drill down your semi-amorphous pile of email and emerge enough structure from it to be able to guide your navigation in it. So much that I can’t even imagine myself functioning without it.

Goes without saying, Seek is open source software and released under a BSD license. There is also a nice screencast that shows you exactly what you can do with it.

What are you waiting for? Stop searching and start finding.