Managing email with MailTags
MailTags was released today by Scott Morrison, the same developer who brought Mail Act-on to Apple Mail. And the new plug-in is just as good. What Act-on does for sorting, MailTags does for email management.
After you install it, a small tag appears in the top right-hand corner of your emails. Clicking on that opens a pane to the right of the message with a number of options (as you can see in the screenshot). You can specify due dates for any tasks the email might contain, give the email a priority level or add comments. You can also add it to a list of current projects that you can specify in Mail’s Preferences Pane. Also, you can make a donation for the software via PayPal (the developer suggests around $20).
The tags are fully searchable in Spotlight and Mail. You can make smart folders based on the tags, and you can integrate them with Act-on’s rules. You could, for example, create a smart folder based on the ‘due date’ tag that contained all the emails which require a response from you within the next three days.
Used together, Act-on and MailTags bring “power-user” features to Apple Mail that were once the domain of Entourage. Conventional wisdom has it that Apple Mail is only good for email dilettantes. Heavy or professional people need to use Entourage (or so MacWorld likes to claim).
Now Apple Mail users gain some of Entourage’s mail management but without the bloat.
MailTags can be downloaded from Scott’s website and is donationware.
UPDATE: MailTags 1.1 was released on 1 November 2005.
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