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Tagging email 10 April 2006

The disorganised nature of email has been bugging me a little recently and even more so the poor tools we currently have at our disposal to try to organise it ourselves. Sure, smart folders in Apple’s Mail.app and labels in Thunderbird go a tiny way to helping but neither of these actually solves the core issue as I see it.

Scenario 1: Suppose I have a 20 message conversation about fixing a bug, midway through that conversation the focus of what bug is being worked on, what file is being worked on or even what project is being worked on takes a shift, all of a sudden the search and organise features available to me don’t cut it as they’re now infected with meta-noise.
Scenario 2: suppose I get sent some important information but the sender has misspelled the key word that I would search for, unless I create rules for my smart folders that look for all the possible misspellings or somehow remember the incorrect spelling, I’m likely to never find that email again.

So, the obvious solution here is a tagging system. In Scenario 1 above, I could tag the emails in the second half of the conversation with what the conversation had actually become about. In Scenario 2 I could tag the message with the correct spelling of the important word.

Anyway, a little bit of googling and I’ve found MailTags for Apple’s Mail.app which I’m going to try out tonight although it doesn’t quite solve the issue fully as far as I can tell because all the meta data is stored locally, which means when I’m on a different machine all my tags are missing.

There’s a propsal for a tags feature in Thunderbird 2 but sadly it seems to miss the point in my opinion.

There’s TagTheBird which currently gets immediately discounted due to the fact that it sends all your email to their servers in plain text and only lets you auto tag, no way to enter your own tags as far as I can work out. I really don’t want all my email sent off to somebody else’s server.

Which brings me to the musings of Alan Gutierrez who has obviously been having the same problems as me organizing his mail. His proposed Thunderbird extension would store the user’s tags in one or multiple x-tag headers in the email itself making the meta data portable. This would also mean I could search the same meta data on my Windows PC at work and my Mac at home. So here’s hoping that someone picks up Alan’s proposal.

tags{ email | tags }

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  1. You’re wrong. TTB lets you enter your own tags via the ‘Message’ menu. Further, autotagging by sending your mail to tagthe.net is optional and can be turned off any time. The reason it’s turned on by default is, that TTB at first was intended to be a showcase for tagthe.net and it’s development was financed by knallgrau, the company behind tagthe.net.


    — Paul Alexandrow    Apr 25, 10:24    #

  2. Addition: I hope that you’re aware of the fact, that if you’re not running your own SMTP-server (and even then, because there’s at least one other relaying SMTP server), all you’re mails (sent and reveiced) are stored on or routed through various other servers for at least a short period of time, where any operator could read or use them as he prefers.


    — Paul Alexandrow    Apr 25, 10:33    #

  3. I guess I beat Alan to the punch.. My HeaderTools extension for Thunderbird allows for addition of headers to the message source, effectively allowing a user to add whatever metadata they want right into the message itself. This implementation integrates well with Thunderbird’s search feature and virtual folders. Read bout it here http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=279907


    — ausdilecce    May 21, 17:02    #

  4. Great stuff, much more in the direction I was hoping for than TTB. I was going to ask if you have any plans to make a tagging specific derivative of this but just tried it out and it pretty much does the job already. The only thing lacking now I guess is Thunderbird being able to search the x-tags.


    — Andy Beaumont    May 22, 01:09    #

  5. Andy, check out our survey and see if these are some of the features you’re looking for.

    Mark

    www.sidefinder.net


    — Mark    Jul 18, 13:45    #

  6. Done. Although please don’t make it an Outlook specific thing. Do people even still use Outlook?


    — Andy Beaumont    Jul 19, 00:37    #

  7. It may not be eventually, but according to any stats I’ve seen, as well as those reflected in the results of the survey thus far, it’s still the most popular by far.

    Thanks for the input. :-)


    — mark    Jul 19, 14:50    #

  8. have you checked out Joyent? they are using tags for email


    — tom    Aug 1, 13:37    #

  9. this might be of interest: http://www.freshpatents.com/Managing-email-communications-using-email-tagging-dt20060216ptan20060036696.php


    — Brian Burchett    Apr 5, 07:00    #

  10. Might have known someone would try to patent the idea.

    http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com


    — Andy Beaumont    Apr 5, 08:16    #