Alan Gutierrez

I’ve been fastidiously tagging my email using Mail.app and MailTags. I’d developed a routine, where I’d copy my mail into a directory for tagging, and then add tags. I’d make sure that the days mail was tagged before shuffling it to an archive.

When MailTags is added to Mail.app, search becomes very slow. This was a problem that I reported in the forums under Search is Unacceptably Slow.

Now, when I rebuild a mailbox, the tags are not downloaded. I’ve reported this in IMAP Loses Tags. This is the deal breaker.

Now I’m looking at Tag the Bird again and wondering how long it would take to hack in IMAP support. Tagging in Thunderbird 2.0 is a joke, as noted in the discussion on the Mozilla wiki, one choses their tags from a drop down menu, which means you must limit your vocabulary.

Reference was made to Tagocity, an extension for Outlook. Thunderbird and MailTags should strive to be half of this, for starters.

I don’t think the guys at Thunderbird really get tagging. As a developer, when I’m in heavy software development mode, my email channels are few and high-volume. The proverbial fire hose. A focused, high-pressure jet of email.

I’ll subscribe to mailing lists, and exchange information with a few collaborators. I can create folders to manage a handful of projects, that have a large volume of mail.

Thunderbird is great for listservs, but with a listserv, you don’t need futher categorization. The discipline of moderation keeps the listserv on topic. Tagging is nothing you need to do.

In my work in outreach, email comes from everywhere, and will make reference every aspect of my work. It is a monsoon. Classification of the email is the first step in responding to it. Gathering the droplets of information into tributaries. Here tagging is a potential life changing tool.

Developers don’t get tagging. (Thunderbird developers especially. The Mozilla project is hamstrug by it’s many, many forums, and depenedency on IRC.) Developers are accustomed to well moderated listservs and newsgroups.

GMail doesn’t do tagging right. The drop down list is painfully slow. You must create a list of tags to choose from. You can’t add a tag that you might use only every once in a while. “French Quarter Festivial” is something that I might get email about ten times a year. I don’t want to have to scroll past “French Quarter Festival”, 363 days of the year.

It’s only saving grace is that it tags a conversation, so that you only need to do this once, and messages thereafter are tagged.

MailTags is close to ideal, except that it’s broken. I’d love to help fix it, but the new version is not open source.