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.

I’ve established a Subversion respository at http://blogometer.com/svn/tbt for the Thunderbird Tagging project lead by Paul Alexandrow and Frederic Wenzel. The Thunderbird Tagging project has been discussed here in the Blogometer and at Frederic’s blog. I use Subversion on Windows, OS X and Linux, and can field and client questions. If Paul has a latest version of Tag the Bird, I can check that in for him, and post some notes on checkout.

Proposal

My modest proposal to implement tagging in Thunderbird. This is a proposal I said I’d write in response to a discussion at fredericiana in the comments of a post entitled Thunderbird Tagging Extension.

This is a feature that would put Thunderbird over the top, in my book, in comparsion to Apple Mail. I use Thunderbird now to read and search mail on my OS X Powerbook. I’ve found that Apple Mail is too slow when searching IMAP folders. Furthermore, I’m finding that the constant indexing performed in Tiger means that I can no longer watch DVDs on my Powerbook without performance blips. I’ve turned Spotlight off to regain usage of my CPU and harddrive.

Thunderbird uses the search capabilities of my IMAP server. It is much faster than Apple Mail. I’m able to read my e-mail from difference computers, since it’s stored in IMAP, and I can use Thunderbird on those different computers, since it is cross-platform.

Since I’d like to stick with Thunderbird, I’d like to have a tagging extension. There already exists a project called Tag the Bird, which may be a good jumping off point, but I thought I’d start with a clean slate discussion of what a tagging extension should be.

Use Cases

Let’s start with the ability to create tag based folders. It is not easy to gather a list of all tags. Not acorss IMAP at least. The only way I can think of, offhand, is an exhaustive search. Perhaps, Thunderbird can keep of list of tags seen in the client, but it would not be authortative. If not, then a person will have to specify which tag based folders they would like to see in their folder pane explicitly.

People will want to tag quickly as they go. I’ve read article about how people are using the five built in categories in Thunderbird as an implementation of Getting Things Done. I’d like to keep similar functionality. I’d like to have hot keyed tags that people could apply to messages in an e-mail triage system.

I’d also like to have hot keyed tag removal, so that someone could sort through a tag based folder, one tagged “deferred” for example, removing the tag for the folder and applying more meaningful tags.

The tagging panel can appear above or below the header window in the message pane. This is where the information about spam and blocked images appears. It would be a simple text box for the addition of tags, with a tag cloud beneath it.

The user will be able to read her mail using the space bar. Tagging is initiated by pressing a hot key to open the tagging panel or to focus on the tagging panel. Tags are entered as space or comma separated tags. When enter is pressed focus returns to the message pane so that the user can continue to browse e-mail using the space bar.

There will be mouse actions as well, but I imagine that many people will want to keep their hands on the keyboard while tagging.

Implementation

Tags are applied to an e-mail message by adding one or more X-Tag headers to the message.

Search is performed using the existing search engine in Thunderbird or through IMAP by searching for an exact match against the value of an X-Tag header. Multiple tags are sought using an boolean and. Ideally searches are case insensitive, which may mean that tags are stored after conversion to lowercase, if the search engines to not support case insenstive matching.

Tag folders are implemented as saved searches, with an interface that creates the folders by specifying the tags to match as a space or comma delimited list.

Questions

I’m not sure which sort of list delimiter I prefer. Space separated tag lists mean no spaces in the tag. This is the format used by del.icio.us. I like del.icio.us and when I use it, I don’t miss whitespace. Comma delimited tag lists allow for spaces in tag names.

Case sentitivity may not be an issue, but I need to know one way or another.

In the comments on Fred’s blog, Alexandre Lemieux has already voiced support for the X-Tag concept. Paul Alexandrow the author of Tag the Bird, has noted that his extension allows for the addition of user tags and that he’s wanted to add IMAP support, which is why I’m going to start out by reading through his source code.

Further thoughts?

Note: Thunderbird Tagging is my original post on this subject, and I’m linking to it to create a trackback.

UPDATE: Thunderbird Tagging Extension - A proposal for IMAP and POP based tagging in Thunderbird.

Apple Mail Is Busted

I’ve been toying with e-mail today. The day is gone. I’m only a step closer to where I want to be.

I want to be able to search my mail. The Apple Mail client is pitifully slow when it searches an IMAP account. I can’t find any information on how to make it work faster.

It wants to mirror all my mail on my laptop, so it can index and search that using Spotlight. Fine. If only it worked. It takes thirty seconds to get a positive response when searching a mailbox that contains a single message. Hopeless.

Any help in this regard is appreciated.

Apple Mail Has Cool Add Ons

I’m a sad Mac user today. I wanted to start tagging my email using MailTags 1.1. I installed this Mail plugin. It’s gorgeous. The tagging interface is easy enough to use. The search depends on Spotlight. Slow enough that I can call it broken.

I also wanted to track my contacts in the new Daylite 3. It also interacts with Apple Mail so you can attach messages to your opportunities and projects. It looks so cool. Without search, it’s useless.

All of these programs look very cool, by the way.

Enter Thunderbird

Now I’m toying around with Thunderbird. It’s searches are blindingly fast. It allows for saved searches, which means I can create mailboxes that are searches in essence.

My guess is that it’s using the IMAP server for search. That’s what it’s there for, right? (When I search for something in Apple Mail, my laptop gets dizzy.)

I know that Apple Mail works wonderfully with POP.

That means downloading all the mail, and not leaving a copy on the server. That’s really stupid in my book. I don’t want my e-mail in one place, like right here, at the end of a bar, in the French Quarter, sitting next to a open container. I want it someplace far away, backed up, centrally located.

I’m not sure now, what I’m going to do for a CRM. Maybe, Sugar CRM, with ZuckerMail.

If I had tagging working, I’d simply e-mail myself summaries of phone conversations and tag them properly, and notes as well.

Tagging With Thunderbird

Tagging in Thunderbird, using IMAP for search. I’m going to blog a proposal.