MailTags 2.2 Public Beta 4: Polished flexibility
As MailTags forges it way towards an official Version 2.2, Scott Morrison has released the fourth public beta of the plugin.
In addition to a bunch of the usual improvements and bug-fixes (improving the reliability of the Spotlight Importer, tweaking some Preference options and settings, a nice resizable keyword token field which now displays all your tags), this latest release addresses a quirk with the way Gmail implements IMAP. In order to prevent problems, it now saves tags only to the local cache of Gmail accounts in Mail.app.
MailTags looks more polished, as Scott makes it into the most “native” plugin going around. It almost seems built-in to the app, rather than an added extra.
The pop-up dialogs for to-dos and events created on a Leopard Mail Note are now a fetching dark brown colour, which blends in nicely with the yellow lined-paper of the Note itself:
I missed the third public beta, being at the beach, so haven’t yet had a chance to note a change in the way MailTags is constructed.
Some elements are now split off as optional “extras” — plug-ins for the plug-in, so to speak — which promises a more efficient, more flexible, more user-customisable future.
It also provides a easy invitation for third-party developers to create specific MailTags plug-ins for their apps (OmniFocus, Yojimbo, Things, iGTD?).
Its iCal integration features are now a separate “extra” and a new feature, the Quick Message Colour Picker is another. It lets you colour-code the selected email with a single mouse click. A new Extras Preference Tab in the MailTags Pane controls their behaviour.
For example, in the Message Colour extra preferences, you can chose your preferred swatch colours and decide whether or not to delete the message colour when all MailTags info is deleted from an email.
If you don’t want an option to colour emails on the fly, you can just disable the extra in the Preferences:
Another small but useful feature in the new beta is the welcome return of the red icon to mark a tag that hasn’t been uploaded to the IMAP server yet. Mail users on dial-up connections at the beach (and probably elsewhere) will be pleased to see this back.
You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the newest, fourth public beta from Scott’s web site 
, where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments.
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January 24th, 2008 at 1:33 am
Mailtags and iGTD have been integrated for a while now. It’s a feature I use every single day and find it hard to live without.
January 24th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Still appears though, that drag-n-drop multiple e-mail bug exists… :(
January 24th, 2008 at 2:59 am
@Stan
As best as I can determine it is more of an issue with Mail than MailTags — Other people who don’t have MT installed have also seen this issue. While Plugins seem to exacerbate it, I don’t know if they cause it. In anycase I am somewhat hoping for a fix from Apple rather than spend time on a workaround. I will bump it up the to look at list however
Scott
January 24th, 2008 at 10:17 am
@Laura: Sure. But wouldn’t it be even better if iGTD has a MailTags extra at allowed you to get assign emails a context and project (and whatever else) right inside the MailTags pane?
January 24th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
Oh I see. Yeah that would be good. :)
February 14th, 2008 at 5:50 am
So far, I’ve been experiencing two recurring problems with the Leopard Public Beta 4:.
1) Smart Folders need to be manually reconfigured every time Mail is launched (e.g., a smart folder set to “Mail Tags Keyword is equal to X” will change to “Any Recipient is equal to X” on relaunch)
2) The “To Dos and Events” pane disappears after a Mail crash and relaunch.
Anyone else seeing these? Otherwise, MT is still da bomb!
May 3rd, 2008 at 5:04 am
So is this blog dead now?