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Ever heard of the 6 Degrees of Separation theory? It goes like this: take any two persons on this planet and you'll discover that the first person knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who [..] knows the second person. Amazingly enough, the number of "hops" (or persons in-between) is likely to be much smaller than what one might expect. Less than 6, if common belief can be trusted.

But you don't have to trust common belief anymore! Yseult is a tool to map email networks. It is not really meant to truly determine degrees of separation (although if you want to go and try to find out how many levels separate you from, say, Andrew Savigne, go ahead), but only as a whimsical project that produce nifty graphs.

You can also see the article Six degrees of separation, which in addition of being quite informative, reveals that Yseult is not original at all and that a similar project has been done in 1998. Drat.

Because it sounded like fun. No, honestly, I was bored and thought it was an amusing project to do. Yseult is at the same time quite simple (there's less than 100 lines of code involved) and quite intricate: it uses a mysql database, a graph plotting software (dot, if you want to know) and involves both email processing and web-page generation.

Send an email to all the friends you want to be linked to, and add in the list of recipient yseult@babyl.dyndns.org. A few minutes later, you should be able to see an updated graph at http://babyl.dyndns.org/yseult.

Yes, it's that easy.

I must, however, insert a disclaimer and a request here. You know, those pyramidal and exponential growth schemes? Although, there's no way they will make you rich, but they can very well bust one poor computer's bandwidth. Yseult will probably fizzle and die after a couple of iteration, but just in case it doesn't, here are the rules that I ask everyone who want to participate to abdibe to.

• Only send Yseult's url to friends' addies, and not to mailing lists, web-based forums or, God preserves me, Slashdot.
• Before sending the link to your friends, check Yseult's main page (http://babyl.dyndns.org/yseult) to make sure that the project is still alive and doing well. If for some reasons I have to halt the project for a few days or weeks, I'll advertise it at that location. If the server doesn't respond, wait a few days and try again. If it still doesn't answer by then, you are free to assume the worst.
• Send no attachements to the email that is copied to yseult@babyl.dyndns.org.
• Add this disclaimer to the email you're sending to your friends.

Aliases

In case you are wary about divulging your email addie, or the addie of a friend, you can tell Yseult to use a name instead by including to any mail sent to yseult@babyl.dyndns.org lines of the following format:

email => real name

Lines that aren't using this format will be ignored. If you want to change your name, just send a new email to yseult@babyl.dyndns.org with the new mapping, and it will override the previous one. For example, the following email would add rd3vil@online.com and bill@whatever.org to the Yseult database and make them appear as 'Hans Champoux' and 'William':

From: yanick1@sympatico.ca
To: rd3vil@online.com, bill@whatever.org
Cc: yseult@babyl.dyndns.org
Subject: Yseult

Congratulation, you just been Yseult'ed!

rd3vil@online.com => Hans Champoux
bill@whatever.org => William

Joy,
`/anick

You have cool suggestions about features that could be added to Yseult? Or you want to lend a hand to the project? By golly, by all means send me an email!