Chris Landon emails with a reasonable request, something you don’t miss or even think about until someone else mentions it.
He points out one thing that Thunderbird and Mail.app can’t do, and that’s coloured mailboxes.
He writes:
Do you know if there’s such a plug-in, etc, for color coding a folder? I have over a hundred folders an it makes it difficult to get to a specific folder, quickly. I could have created more sub-folders than the bunch I already have, but this does not help my situation either.
Here’s an example (I was using Thunderbird at the time and it does not have it either)…
Would it also be difficult to write a plug-in for this?
I don’t know of a plugin that does this, nor do I know how difficult it would be to code, but my hunch is a lot of people would use it.
YES, I AGREE. I would use it too! Give me give me give me! :-)
I’d use it.
I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time… It’s the only thing I’ve really missed since switching from Entourage.
Ditto.
i could use a plug-in like that …
The commenting timestamps aren’t quite right. I meant to ditto to Adam Rice, who was the only commenter when I arrived (and no, I didn’t load the page and then wait an hour before posting).
Rough counting says that I have just over a hundred folders and subfolders. Personally I would not like to use color to categorize the folders. Instead I categorize by giving few folders a number prefix. Maybe someone would like to check this little system to make his/her own personal sorting:
01 Important category, (pick your own names)
02 Little less important
03 and so on…
On the first of each month I have about 500 mails that I have not yet sorted, usually because I want to see related mails at glance (in the advertising business there is no way to keep an empty Inbox). Those monthly mails go into archive folders that I name like this as I split the archives into quarters:
2007
Q1.2007
Q2.2007 etc
Then when and if I have a quiet moment I select all last years quarter folders, sort by sender and clean out those senders that have no meaning anymore or similar reasons.
Finally I have a subfolder called Old Mails where I keep single mails I that I want to keep, but don’t really fall into any category. My oldest mail dates from the year 1995.
YES! YES! YES! Give me the highlighted colored folders anyday. Great idea!
A pro pos folders and navigation in Thunderbird:
There is an invaluable add-on for Thunderbird called Nostalgy that will help you get to your folders quickly. It doesn’t use colours but rather lets you type ahead to get to your destination folder.
You invoke it by pressing G (for “Go to”) and begin typing the name of the folder you want to go to. Nostalgy homes in on search results as you type.
The syntax also supports moving (S for save) and copying (C) selected messages between folders.
https://addons.mozilla.org/thunderbird/2487/
Thank heavens it doesn’t do that. Talk about f-ugly.
What’s _really_ missing is the ability to use rules to file attachments as well as messages. (Which Eudora can do.)
I was having a similar discussion, I think over at MacAddict.com and whipped up this conceptual rendering when we were discussing that fact that Apple’s “label” feature should be present in pretty much every application especially Apple Applications that have or deal with lists(Address Book, iChat, Mail, and so on). Some Apps already have it; Apple Remote Desktop, for example, lets you “label” a client any of the colors you can label a folder. I think you should be able to label addresses in Address Book, Folders in Mail, and so on…
For my rendering I used iChat, in which I would LOVE to be able to label “buddies”…
http://asthmaticavenger.com/siteimages/ichatleo.jpg
Whoops thought I would be able to imbed this image in the last comment…