MailTags: Irresistable force meets immovable object
Remember O’Reilly big hitter Allison Randal and her overflowing inbox?
She’s decided to try stemming the flow 
with Mail.app and MailTags and Mail Act-on , two of the very best plugins for Apple Mail.
It is interesting to see what she discovers and whether she is hopeful that it will be enough to meet the challenge of her 20,000 email inboxes. Interesting too to ponder whether better tools can beat a cultural problem.
Two things at least are better than she holds out. Emails can be tagged with rules in mail.app, so manual tagging is not the only way to bring some order into your data. And the public beta of MailTags does bring reliable syncing of IMAP tags between more than one Mac.
I think, though, that even the most partisan MailTagger would have to concede her other point. You do need to use a Mac to enjoy the plugin’s benefits.
I wonder if Scott is secretly working away on an Outlook or Thunderbird version?
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Tags: Apple Mail, inbox of doom, Linux, mail act-on, mail.app, mailtags, mutt, plugins, Productivity
October 31st, 2006 at 10:58 pm
Outlook or Vista version?….
Unfortunately not this year. — If MS started using obj-c and cocoa, maybe soon.
October 31st, 2006 at 11:02 pm
Doh! Undone (again) by the eagle-eyes of a code-hardened programmer. :)
Sorry about that. Fixed now
October 31st, 2006 at 11:08 pm
Oh — I thought you meant vista Mail — but thunderbird — that may be a possibility more than outlook — at least there is source code there to mingle in. But 2.0 release and Leopard versions first…
October 31st, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Absolutely!
I was freelancing again today and spent another day trapped in Vista. Obviously, I can’t get it out of my head.
November 1st, 2006 at 12:39 am
Maybe I’m missing it, but the link for the mentioned story is:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/10/apples_email_so.html
November 1st, 2006 at 12:45 am
Thanks, Jeff. That’s twice in two days that I have done that :(
November 1st, 2006 at 10:21 am
Actually she was wrong about the third point as well. There is an option in MailTags to make keywords transparent. They can then easily be read on other machines.
November 1st, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Put that way, I suppose that’s true. It would be read-only though. Still, good point.
November 1st, 2006 at 9:54 pm
Rules via IMAP have never worked reliably for me. The only way they do work is if I manually apply them by selecting all mail in my Inbox and then “Apply Rules”. So…applying a MailTags rule only seems to be an option with a POP account.
Also, since I use multiple Macs to access my e-mail (hence the use of IMAP) not having MailTags portability makes it of limited use. Yes, I know that MailTags 2.0 supports this and as soon as it’s out of beta I’ll move there. I’ll check out the “transparent” feature Kerim notes. That’ll at least give me visibility to my tags when I log in remotely.
So…from a “it’s shipping and not in beta” viewpoint I give her Allison full marks.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:19 am
Erm, that is if I knew how to turn “transparent” on. Google has not been my friend in this regard.
November 2nd, 2006 at 12:24 am
I’m pretty sure that you need to be using the public beta
to get the option.
You will find the option in Preferences -> MailTags -> IMAP. Just check the “Store Project and Keywords in separate X-Headers” box.
July 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
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