I agree with you entirely and been wanting to find folks who are willing to make a case to the gmail folks if they are not working on this already (I don’t have any inside info – only contacts).

Right now I have a what I’ll call at best, a “homeboy” version of GTD implemented in the gmail interface. It obviously lacks quite a bit (esp in the area of automation) but the components are clearly coming (ie. Google Calendar for a tickler, day-specific todos)

One the things that is missing most for me is a bonafide API – I want to be able to query and manage my metadata (ie. my contexts) with simple scripts or even a mashup.

It’s a pleasant surprise to see Apple Mail GTD implementations – I had dismissed it quite awhile ago and starting to miss my Netcentrics GTD Add-in which went out the door with my commitment to be with Google Mail over the past year!

ok – to set the record straight, I don’t intend to get onto Apple Mail til Leopard releases this Spring so it’s 6 more moths of fiddling with gmail with anyone who is interested too. Anyone playing with the developer preview of Apple Mail with the new todo service?

ps. pls excuse me if I am going off topic in a Apple Mail-centric blog. any suggestions on where to move this conversation is much appreciated – the GTD forum was a bit to generic last I checked – I tend to bond more with us Mac OS X folks :)

let’s not forget Google Mail has introduced tagging (aka labels) for quite some time now!

Gmail labels are very basic, e.g. they can’t be nested or clouded. It’s an example of why I said earlier that Gmail lacks capabilities important to me for organizing messages. It has many concepts I like but the overall implementation still seems immature. Heck, Apple Mail is frustratingly close to being ideal for my relatively modest purposes if it would just grow up a bit.

now does MailTags up the ante by providing a taxonomy browser of some type or even a tag cloud?

My list is admitted out of control and wish I could cluster certain tags due to higher-order contexts.

I am not a .Mac user – does meta-data such as tags get reflected in the remote interface? I’m a big stickler for web-interfaces and really excited about the new Leopard improvements coming down the pipe and really want to know how remote access to Mail, iCal, todos, notes is to pan out!

Yep, MailTags & Spotlight have managed to make that possible. Consequently I’ve saved a packet of time in deciding which folder to put a message in, putting it there, looking for it and so on.

I’ve not had a problem with Spotlight not finding messages, nor with ~3000 messages in my Archive folder.

I do have problems with MailTags not carrying tags forward into replies. It’s very unreliable (possibly due to user error) which means sent mail is searched via content rather than tags.

I am not aware of a single mail application that handles having huge or even large inboxes and folders well.

When I used Mulberry it handled my largest IMAP mailboxes relatively efficiently. IMAP or not, I agree that issues like performance and stability can become a factor in determining optimal mailbox sizes.

Plenty of people seem to be managing their monolithic Gmail mailboxes okay with only a combination of conversation threading, searching and simplistic labeling.

I like Gmail’s “folderless” storage but as a mail client it lacks capabilities still important to me for organizing messages. And I dislike filing messages in separate, (semi-)permanent mailboxes as a way to organize them with traditional mail clients.

I’d prefer a mail client where all my messages were easily accessible in a single iTunes-like library “Mail Archive” (regardless of how the backend storage were implemented for efficiency’s sake), with virtual mailboxes similar to iTunes playlists for collecting/organizing/viewing messages in various ways. It would be trivial to create those mailboxes from search results and add/delete messages to/from them automatically or manually. An “INBOX” would just be a virtual mailbox matching appropriate conditions. Deleting virtual mailboxes wouldn’t actually delete messages they contain unless explicitly requested. Sort of a fusion of Gmail and traditional clients, plus additional message attributes (e.g. tags) for more flexibility.

Anthony – I have about 8000 mails in my inbox at work, and 5500 ish at home, and I’ve never had a problem ;-) I do appreciate that on some people’s set ups, though, it can get a bit slow. Also, I’m not using IMAP, which I think would get pretty problematic with the everything-in-one-mailbox model – maybe folders for each month would work in that case.

I think it’s more about getting rid of the “must file; must have an empty inbox” mantra that a lot of people have, and moving to something easier, quicker and more flexible.

(Oh and by the way, it’s David Emery, not Emory.)

searching in the notes field works fine for me too.