MailTags , the prince of Mail.app plugins, is becoming so wide-spread that it is now a force to reckon with for other developers as well.

Recent updates to two other apps offer better ways to integrate MailTags data.

The latest version of up-and-coming “Getting Things Done” app iGTD imports MailTags tags along with emails when you use the app’s F5 hotkey.

DockStar 2.0.2 (Hawk Wings Review) resolves an issue in showing mail counts for smart mailboxes based on MailTags. Now, you can make a “@followup” smart mailbox based on your keywords and set Dockstar to show the total number of messages in this mailbox as a separate badge on the Mail icon. mail,.app, apple mail, mailtags, tags, integration, getting things done, gtd, productivity, dockstar

I am still working out how to manage my new Real Life job better so that Hawk Wings gets more of my time.

Most recently, while I was busy…

1. KIT (“Keep It Together”), a nice personal information manager that almost gives Yojimbo a run for its money, was substantially updated. It now boasts a slicker interface, searchable tags, five star rating (à la iTunes) and more — see the full changelog for all the improvements.
2. OMIC got an update too. This utility which unpacks the dreaded winmail.dat files Outlook users sometimes send (see earlier Hawk Wings review) now has support for installation over Apple Remote Desktop and for RTF text, and is packaged in a smarter installer.
3. MailRecent 1.0.3 now adds any moves or copies using a MailRecent menu to the “Move to … Again” (or “Copy to … Again”) menu items in the Message menu and the corresponding contextual menu. This means that the last “recent” move or copy can be repeated via that menu item or the built-in Mail keyboard shortcut Option-Command-T.

mail.app, apple mail, plugins, PIM, productivity, winmail.dat, outlook, filing, tags

Michael Tsai has released an update to his tag-smart, open-format PIM app EagleFiler.

Michael could have aimed higher and called it EagleFiler 2.0; with over 110+ new improvements and tweaks, it certainly carries enough newness to warrant the higher number.

Fortunately, I don’t have to type them all out. Michael has provided a complete changelog for the update.

Here are five new features in the app that caught my eye:

1. IMAP support and smarter Mail.app capture. EagleFiler can now IMAP mailboxes and individual email messages from Apple Mail. Nice!
2. Omnivorous, universal importing. You can now import every file known to mankind into EagleFiler. If it doesn’t know how to display it, EagleFiler displays the icon for the file and lets you open it in another app.
3. Tag auto-completion. Tags now auto-complete as you type them, a great feature which saves both time and errors. EagleFiler now also displays an item’s tags in the status bar at the bottom of the window, so what you see them easily and edit or add to them.
4. Quick Editing of web archives. A new “Added Convert For Editing” command quickly converts web archives to RTFD files for editing.
5. Import of MailTags projects as tags. Emails marked with MailTags projects are tagged with those project names when imported into EagleFiler.

That only scratches the surface.

With the new tagging improvements especially, people who are into Getting Things Done (GTD) will find it even easier to adapt the tips in yesterday’s “Getting Things Done with Yojimbo” post to EagleFiler.

I find it hard to place EagleFiler into a hierarchy or scheme with other personal information managers (PIMs). It is more flexible but less polished than Yojimbo, more open but less fully featured than SOHO Notes, less powerful but less bloated than the DEVONthink projects.

Perhaps the best way for you to judge is to test it out yourself.

A demo is available from Michael’s site . If you like it, a licence costs USD 40. mail.app, apple mail, emails, imap, productivity, tagging, information manager, tags, pim

On the Yojimbo mailing list, Robert Foxworthington has posted his system for “Getting Things Done” (GTD) with Yojimbo.

It’s the first comprehensive attempt to do this that I’ve seen, and makes clever use of the new tagging features recently introduced in Yojimbo 1.3.

Naturally I prefer to use Mail.app to manage how I get things done, but Yojimbo is also a good candidate as Robert points out:

It’s lightweight, easy to use and very well designed (usability wise). Since I keep a lot of my “stuff” in Yojimbo, I also wanted to do my GTD in it so that all things are in one place instead of spread out over multiple applications… which, ever since tagging support was introduced in 1.3, works pretty well now.

He uses Yojimbo Collections to define his projects, grouping them by assigning the same custom icon to home projects or work projects.

Most actions or tasks are empty notes with just a title (and tags). He admit that he misses the strike-out feature for completed actions that often grace GTD apps but it’s not fatal:

When you’re done with an action, simply click Yojimbo’s Delete button and select “Move to Trash”. That way of course, the completed action just moves to the trash and there is no cool crossing-it-out-which-makes-you-feel-you-just-accomplished-something, but that’s OK. You can always look at the Trash’s item count to see that you’re actually getting things done.

Contexts, people, “states” and due dates are all handled by tags with specific suffixes:

Contexts are tags with an @ suffix (e.g. home@, work@).

People have tags too, basically the person’s initials with a #
suffix (e.g. af#, sk#).

Tags with a + suffix are used for “states” (e.g. waiting+,
deferred+, someday+, inbox+).

Due date tags are a date with an ! suffix (e.g. 0612!, 061224!).

Using suffixes helps Yojimbo to auto-complete the tag more reliably.

These customised tags give him nice flexibility in filtering his items with Yojimbo’s search box:

Search for the “home@” tag to see all the things to do at home… or search for “fm#” to see all the items that are related to Fred Madison, or simply search for the “#” tag to see all items that involve other people… or search for “!” to see all the items that have a due date, or search for “0612″ to see everything that’s due in December 2006… or create tag collections for frequently used searches like “inbox+”… or search for the “Urgent” label to see all urgent tasks.

Yojimbo can’t order actions and items as well as some other GTD apps nor does it easily allow for sub-projects, but Robert finds that he doesn’t miss those traditional aspects of the GTD approach as much as he thought he would.

It’s a fine system, useful and clever in equal parts.

If you are not a Yojimbo user, there are lots of other Mac apps to help you get things done.GTD, getting thins done, yojimbo, productivity, tags, collections, howto, mail.app, apple mail

On the Yojimbo mailing list, Dylan Damian shared two applescripts that help to integrate the new tagging feature of Yojimbo 1.3 with del.icio.us and NetNewsWire.

They use pukka to tag a URL in either Safari or NetNewsWire, post the link to del.ico.us and then create a web archive of the page in Yojimbo complete with the same tags.

For example, if you run the first script (tip: make a Quicksilver trigger for it) when viewing a web page in Safari, it launches pukka.

Tag the page with your chosen del.icio.us tags, and submit the page.

Pukka posts the URL to del.icio.us for you and then the script creates a web archive of the page in Yojimbo with the same tags.

Yojimbo becomes in effect, an off-line backup for your del.icio.us links.

The second script does the same thing from NetNewsWire.

In a nice additional touch, the scripts get Growl to tell you that they have done their job.

It’s all very clever and works a treat.

You can get the text of the scripts from Dylan’s post in the Yojimbo mailing list archive or just grab the two scripts here (PukkaAndYojimbo.zip).

They are easiest to use (I think) if you place them in the Safari and NetNewsWire folders in your ~/Library/Scripts/Application directory. Unless you are partial to NetNewsWire’s own Script menu, in which case you are looking for ~/Library/Application Support/NetNewsWire/Scripts.

[Big hat-tips to Dylan]not apple mail, not mail.app, yojimbo, netnewswire, pukka, delicious, urls, web archives, tags, applescript

Program co-Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention , Allison Randall, is the latest figure to produce a list of features for her dream email client (following TextMate developer Allan Odgaard and the celebrities in Hawk Wing’s “Talking Mail.app” series).

She’s called her piece “the problem of email”, and it’s not hard to see why:

When I say “my inbox is out of control”, people respond “Yeah, mine too. I spent 5 hours this weekend and knocked it down from 3,000 messages to 50 messages and I feel so much better.” I have over 20,000 messages spread out over 5+ inboxes. This is after I declared defeat 5 months ago, dumped everything into an archive, and started fresh. This is after I unsubscribed from all but the critical mailing lists (Perl lists and internal company mailing lists). This is after spending 3-5 hours every day working on email, and sometimes spending all day on it.

This leads to her to list the eight features in an email client that would help her “be faster and more effective at managing the email I’ve got”.

By my count, Apple Mail only does half of them.

[Thanks, Scott and Bruce]mail.app, apple mail, junk, tags, email, offline, to-do list, searching

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. email, folders, tags, mailtags, mail.app,apple mail, productivity, plugins