Flagit!: Customised flags for Mail.app
Ever felt that the red flag in Mail.app doesn’t offer you enough flexibility?
Flagit! is a plug-in that offers Mail.app users customisable flags of as many different colours as you like, as well as question and exclamation marks.
It is packaged as a plug-in for SIMBL 
, an Input Manager that allows application-specific hacks for Cocoa apps (like Mail.app).
It is not heavy on documentation. Pay close attention to the installer screen, because it offers you all the information you will get on how to use its new features:
Once installed, you can access its features through the “Mark” option in the contextual menu. Highlight the email you want to flag, Control-click (or right-click) on the email and choose the flag you want:
The Customize option opens a preference pane with room to edit the default flags and create as many new ones as you need:
It also provides the option to colourise the text of the email that you have flagged. Combined with the option to colourise the backgrounds of emails (which I do through Mail Act-on — Leopard users this way ), it can produce a riot of colour in your inbox.
If I wasn’t very happy about marking emails done or needing attention or waiting for a response with the keywords feature of MailTags , I could imagine using this, and benefitting from the additional visual help of coloured flags.
Flagit! works with Tiger and Leopard and is shareware (USD 8). You can download a 15-day free demo from the developer’s web site .
UPDATE: Users report in the comments that Flagit! doesn’t play nicely with the WideMail plugin. The comments also contain some tips on uninstalling Flagit!
Tags: Apple Mail, flags, hacks, mail.app, plugins, Productivity, SIMBLRelated posts
July 8th, 2008 at 1:22 am
Installed FlagIt!
- Restarted Mail
- WideMail stopped Working
- Mails would not load
- Mail Hung
- Restarted and same issues
Installed FlagIt!
- Everything back to normal
July 8th, 2008 at 1:25 am
Thanks for posting the feedback. I don’t use WideMail , so didn’t see that.
I blame SIMBL. I’ve had a lot of conflict problems with that and SIMBL-driven plug-ins in the past.
July 8th, 2008 at 2:16 am
After installing, I could not get my message viewer window to open. I, too, have Widemail installed. As much as I like this plugin, Widemail is more important to me at this point. Would love to hear if others besides Scott are having any luck running both WideMail and Flagit!.
July 8th, 2008 at 6:41 am
Hey Guys This is Tim from TastyApps (makers of Flagit!) …
Still working out some of the kinks in this app - only released it a few days ago, you guys are the first to try it out ! ;-)
I’ll be trying to get things worked out over the next few days.
Thanks for baring with me :-/
-Tim
July 8th, 2008 at 11:22 am
Hi guys,
I have been using Widemail and then I installed Flagit and my mail app just don’t work. I can see mail app window but emails are not loading, I have all types of column heads labels in the message viewing window but then I get the spinning balloon that keeps on spinning. I did not find any documentation as how to uninstall Flagit.
July 8th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Ok… I have just removed the Flagit plugin from user/library/application support/SIMBL
Tim, please let us know if the conflict with Widemail can be fixed. I wanted to give it a try, but my gf who has just switched was really missing this feature she had on outlook express on PC.
July 8th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Yann — I think that you need to delete two folders for a complete uninstall:
(i) The SIMBL bundle itself which installs in your /Library/InputManagers folder, and
(ii) The Flagit! bundle which installs into your Home directory at ~/Library/Application Support/SIMBL/Plugins (and which you have found already).
More details on the SIMBL site
July 9th, 2008 at 2:27 am
[...] thaat keeps me the busiest. I have my favorite email apps that keep me Mostly Organized. But, HawkWings just introduced me to another app that I just had to have. FlagIt! Flagit! is a plug-in that [...]
July 15th, 2008 at 7:12 am
every app i’ve used w simbl causes me numerous hours of painstaking work to get my system back to where it was. wifinder doesn’t work; flagit forced me to rebuild my entire mail app…too bad. tastyapps guys seem nice….
July 15th, 2008 at 8:15 am
I notice a new build of FlagIt! is out on MacUpdate but with no changelog. I wonder if they’ve cracked the SIMBL problems.
July 16th, 2008 at 6:29 am
Hey guys… ok we had some bugs with the 1.0beta - 1.1 is up now - should be a lot more stable. Fixed a bunch of bugs, the main ones being the conflict with Widemail and the lack of country support outside English/USA.
If anyone is still having problems please email us through the site, i’ll be able to help you out directly.
Thanks !
July 16th, 2008 at 7:50 am
Good news. I’ll have a look.
A changelog would help users to know what has changed from build and build. I recommend them!
July 17th, 2008 at 12:17 am
Tim,
I’m afraid the new version is still giving me trouble with Widemail installed. As soon as I install FlagIt, Mail breaks — it loads in the dock, but my mail window will not open, and I’m unable to close the program. When I force quit and manually remove the files you list above, it works again.
Both FlagIt and Widemail are their newest versions. OS is Leopard with all Software Updates up-to-date. Good luck fixing this, as it’s software I’d definitely love to buy.
Drew
July 17th, 2008 at 12:53 am
Ok Drew - it might be because you had some of the remnants of the old version in there… try this…
1. close mail
2. remove the flagit! plists from user/library/mail/
3. remove the flagit.bundle from user/library/application support/SIMBL
4. reinstall flagit! (v1.1b - from the website)
Lemme know if that works for you.
July 19th, 2008 at 12:40 am
Tim,
I’m afraid I’m still having the same problem. I can give you a little more info to hopefully help track this down. I removed all of the files you said except “flagit! plists from user/library/mail/”. I didn’t see anything that looked flagit related in that folder. Let me know what file name(s) I should be seeing.
When I install FlagIt and reopen mail, my message viewer window is always closed. If I go to Window -> Message Viewer, the message viewer will open, but it’s no longer in Widemail format. I can select different messages and mark them as expected, however at no time can I see any actual e-mails come up in the mail viewing window. It perpetually says “Loading…”
Any other ideas?
July 19th, 2008 at 1:32 am
Follow-up… It seems that having LetterBox installed (I didn’t even realize I still did) was at least part of if not the whole problem. I removed LetterBox, Widemail, and FlagIt, and reinstalled just Widemail and Flagit. So far, everything seems to be working correctly!
July 19th, 2008 at 2:47 am
LetterBox… hmmm… thanks for that info Drew… I’ll look into it right away.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Hey guys… for anyone following this thread i *think* we have a stable build up - that should play nicely with any other mail plugins. If anyone has a moment please test it out and email me at customer-service (at) tastyapps (dot) com - let me know how it fairs !
November 3rd, 2008 at 6:17 am
I downloaded Flagit to try it out. I have a MacBook 10.5.5 Build 9F33. I have two mail accounts in Mail. One of my accounts is a MobileMe account and the other is my company’s 2003 SMB Exchange account. I have never had any problems with my exchange account until I installed Flagit. All of a sudden I could not send any emails with my Exchange account. Flagit broke my SMTP and caused Mail to repeatedly reject and ask me for my password. SInce the installer didn’t include uninstall instructions, I had to scour the web to find out how to get rid of it. I figured out it was under the userhome/Library/Application_Support/SIMBL/Plugins. Once I removed it and restarted Mail all my outbox messages for my Exchange account sent. Also, don’t forget to remove the Flagit.plist file. It is in userhome/Library/Mail.
June 23rd, 2009 at 12:54 am
@Joshua
Heya Joshua… First, thanks for trying out Flagit!, i’m very sorry it gave you problems.
We have had some reports of Flagit! not working with certain flavors of exchange server - however, we can’t quite figure out why…
I would be very appreciative if you could help us debug this particular error, just email us at ‘customer-service (at) tastyapps (dot) com’