Alan Gutierrez

In response to my frank comments at the indev.ca forums and my blog post How I Lost My Morning to Tagging and EMail, one Scott Morrison wrote me to assure me that the data was not lost, and asked that I help troubleshoot the problem.

Obviously someone who suffers the delusion that the customer is always right. I subscribe to the Be Nice Or Leave school of customer service. Especially when the customer has yet to pay for anything.

So, rather than be a complete bastard, I zipped up a copy of a sample message, one from the server, one from my MacBook, and sent it on its way. Maybe that will tell him something.

But, what would I do if it was my code? I’d connect to the IMAP server and trace though the code. I really want MailTags to work. I figured, why not just set up an email account for Scott? No better way to reproduce the problem.

I set up an account and sent him a message.

A few hours later, three messages from Scott. The first two zeroing in on the fact that Dovecot stomps the X-Keywords header, where the tags are stored. They are also stored in a JSON string in the X-MailTags header, so the third message had a new MailTags bundle that reads the tags from that header.

After dropping it into place, I rebuild my mailboxes, and my tags reappearedThey were never lost, stored in two separate headers. Apparently, Courier IMAP is not capricious as Dovecot. It doesn’t munge headers the way Dovecot does. Scott’s communications shows that he knows his way around IMAP. Certainly keeping a MailTags specific header for the tags shows foresight. That time spent tagging was not lost.

Now, I’m tagging away again. MailTags is very much a part of my workflow.

That and Mail ActOn, which is another indev.ca addition to Mail.app.

Actually, I’d spent the day despondent wondering what I was going to do without MailTags, now that I’d become accustomed to it.

Update: It is a known issue with Dovecot, as noted in Problem/workaround with X-Keywords and Apple’s Mail.app. I wonder how this is address in Thunderbird, since it seems to always behave correctly, although there is evidence of issues as in 1.0 beta3 not preserving X-Keyword header?.

Update:: I’m now, as of April 14th, 2007, eagerly awaiting Public Beta 10. I’ll be checking the Mail Tags 2.0 site frequently. Public Beta 9 just expired. Scott Morison expires his betas so people are forced to upgrade, which is not a bad idea at all.

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.