David Emery provides a rave review of how Spotlight and MailTags, the prince of plugins, help him to be more productive at the office.

Everyone else in the office files their emails. Not David:

In a work environment I can just about understand the need for filing things in folders; but I think this behaviour stems from how older email programs worked. With Mail.app on Mac OS X 10.4 the search is brilliant…. Hence, whenever I want to find a specific email I just search for it; which takes about the same time I imagine opening a folder and scanning its contents for the correct email would take.

He gets extra search precision and power by using MailTags :

Using this plugin, I tag every email that comes in with a set of tags that will help when I come so search for something. So, for example, if I get an email about a Thom Yorke website, I’ll tag it with “Thom Yorke” and “XL” (the [recording] label). This also exposes another weakness with the traditional filing model – you can’t have something in two folders at once.

All this tagging, though, only helps to add some context to an email that might not happen to mention its topic – a notes panel would do the trick as well, if it was searchable.

Regular Hawk Wings readers will remember recent research on how hard it is for people to give up folders for their email.