Zoe Installation and Setup FAQ


Q: What am I supposed to do with a .tgz file?
A: Zoe is distributed in tgz format. This is a standard unix compression method and WinZip can handle these no problem (details here).  Uncompress the .tgz file and you will have a Zoe.jar file. This is the actual application. Assuming you have the  JavaTM 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SETM) version 1.3.1 or higher (download the latest version here) you should be able to just double click on it and it will run.

Q; How do I run Zoe?
A: Just double click on the Zoe.jar file and it will open up a new web page. You will want to bookmark this page to easily get back to Zoe when you've gone to another page. The URL from your computer (if you have zoe running) is
http://127.0.0.1:10080/   You'll probably want to bookmark this URL.

Q: How do I create an account?
A: Click on the "ZOE" at the top of the main page to get to the preferences page. Click on "ACCOUNTS" and fill in the form.

Q: How do I import my existing e-mails?
A: If you're on OSX or Unix you can just click the import button (details follow) when you set up an account and it will import everything in your .mbox. If you have trouble with this please file a bug report and let us know what OS you're running and what happened. Go to the preference panel (under "ZOË" on the main page). Click on one of your account. Clik on "IMPORT". ZOË will check your ~/Library/ folder for any mbox files and import them.
A: ZOË also uses SMTP as an import mechanism. To import your messages you will need to setup ZOË as your SMTP server in your current email client. ZOË's SMTP server runs on port 10025. Once that is done, just forward your messages to ZOË as attachments. This is the important part: you need to forward your messages as attachments otherwise ZOË will not recognize them as emails but just as plain text.

Q: How do I import from Outlook?
A: Outlook doesnt' have an .mbox format but there is a workaround for that called OUT2UNIX (Outlook to Unix) which will generate a .mbox from Outlooks proprietarty data files.

Q. How do I get ZOË to automatically read in new emails?
A. After importing emails, you may want to set up ZÖE so that it's part of your email routine. ZOË will periodically check the POP or IMAP server (the frequency is not configurable). Make sure that whatever other e-mail client you use doesn't delete the messages from the server when it check them. If it does Zoe won't necessarily see them.

Q: Is there any way to index sent mail too?
A: Yes. Zoe has a built in SMTP server. If you tell your e-mail client to use Zoe for it's SMTP server it will grab a copy of the e-mail for indexing and send it on to its destination. You just have to turn on SMTP forwarding (see the next question).

Q: How do I setup SMTP forwarding?
A: You need to go through the same steps as for "How do I import my old emails?" Also, you need to enable forwarding in ZOË for your account. Just go to your account preferences panel and check the "forward messages to server" box under the SMTP section.

Q: How do I run ZOË "inside" my email client?
A:ZOË will email a "greeting" message containing... ZOË itself... Your mileage may vary...

Q: How do I shut down Zoe?
A: You probably tried to quit ZOË from the Java application menu. Quit ZOË by going to the Preference's page in your browser, click on Application under services, and you'll see a 'shut down' button.  On the Mac (Pre-Jaguar) Zoe won't quit when your shut down / restart your computer, you have to manually go into the preferences and quit it. This is a known bug.

Q. How do I get OS X's Mail.app to work?
A. Mail.app doesn't allow you to change the SMTP server port. But you can get OS X to forward SMTP traffic on port 25 to port 10025 on your local machine by using this command.  This requires an admistrators account on your box (the default account is) and it will ask you for your password. WARNING. Don't do this if other people have accounts on and share your machine because this will alter how mail is sent for everyone and they probably won't have Zoe running when they log in.

sudo ssh -L 25:127.0.0.1:10025 127.0.0.1 -n -f -N
(thanks to Bruce C.Dillahunty for this tip)


If you don't want to mess around with that you can jsut use a different mail client. Mozilla, is one of the many free mail clients (as well as web browser) that work on the mac and will let you specify a port number for your SMTP server.

Q: Can I use Zoe as a POP3 server?
A: Yes! Basically you need to point your client to 'localhost:10110'. You would also need to turn login on as that's the username/password used by the pop server for identification. You do this in the account preferences page.

Q: How do I get Zoe to read all of the folders in my IMAP account?
A: Zoe will only read the e-mails in your inbox folder.

Q: Where is Zoe's RSS Feed?
A: To the left of "Today" on the main page you will see "XML" This is the link to an RSS feed of your mail. Subscribe to this URL using your favorite RSS reader and you should be all set.



Special Thanks to Raphael and Sydney for thier tips.