It’s a great day for Mail.app users. The public beta of MailTags 2.0 has been released, bringing with it full IMAP tag support, tagging of outgoing messages, tag sharing, a revamped, more flexible MailTags pane, the display of keywords, projects and other MailTags info in the ListView and more.

In some ways it offers better productivity features than Leopard Mail and it’s here now.

IMAP tag support

Probably the most anticipated new feature is full support for tagging emails in IMAP accounts.

This is achieved by storing the keywords, projects and other metadata in encoded X-MailTags headers in the email itself. When new MailTags information is added, MailTags writes a new copy of the message to the server. The metadata is stored server-side, making it available on any Mac you use which has MailTags 2.0 installed. Synchronised tagging has arrived whether you are in the office, at home or on the road.

You can also choose to save the metadata in clear text so that other email clients like Thunderbird will be able to read it.

The MailTags Pane

Many of the new features in this beta are best understood from the new-look MailTags pane.

Individual sections of the pane can be hidden or shown as you prefer by clicking on the disclosure triangle in the top left of its header.

Interaction with iCal continues to improve. Support for to-dos allows you to set priorities, due dates and to add comments in the Notes field. You can set a default calendar for MailTags to use in the MailTags Preferences.

The linkage between Mail.app and iCal has been improved through the use of a new URL format (message://mymessage-id @ server.com) which will find the relevant email regardless of the actual file location.

The Notes field now automatically expands with the size of the window, so that verbose people like me can see all the info for a particular email more easily.

In another much-hoped improvement, the Notes field can be used to replace the subject line of the email (see the subject line in italics in the screenshot below). Neat!

In the Compose window MailTags pane, additional options allow you to tag your outgoing message and/or tag the original message with the same tags as the reply. You can also create a rule to accept reject tags based on any criteria (such as member ship in a specific address book group).

This is a real bonus for work groups. Tagging outgoing messages gives people working on shared projects the ability to accept and share tags with other collaborators.

Of course, you may run into a nutcase using MailTags 2.0, so the option to refuse attached tags is also included.

Seeing your tags in the ListView

One of my favourite new features is the ability to see your projects and tags in the Message ListView, which provides additional and immediate visual cues about what you need to get done.

Command-clicking on any column header to add or remove the project, keyword, priority and due date columns.

When matched to the project-related colour coding of messages, you know at once what needs to be done in what sphere of your life:

The expanded Preferences now contain a number of separate panes to manage the plugin’s options. These options and MailTags 2.0′s other new features are set out in an expanded and comprehensive readme file.

How does it compare with Leopard Mail, or at least, with as much of Leopard Mail as we have seen? As Scott says,

While Mail 3.0 brings some MailTags-like features to Mail, MailTags continues to add many features not included with Mail 3.0, including keywords, project and priority tagging, saving notes directly with message, changing subject lines, dynamic coloring of messages, full integration with rules and smart mailboxes, and more.

Upgrade Warning!!

Installing MailTags 2.0 will erase the settings for MailTags 1.2.2. This is set out at the top of the plugin’s new readme file, but is worth repeating. However, MailTags 2.0 saves a backup of your info so that can go back to MailTags 1.2.2 if you decide that the beauty and power of MailTags 2.0 is not for you.

Registration and Special Offer

MailTags 2.0 is not donation-ware. It is shareware (USD 29.95). After a trial 30 day period, unregistered users will be unable to tag messages.

During the beta test period, you can purchase MailTags 2.0 for a reduced price of USD 25 by following the links in MailTags preferences.

MailTags has more than quadrupled the productivity grunt of Mail.app for me. It is money very well spent.

You can get the public beta from Scott’s site where you will also find a support forum for all your MailTags queries.

Of course, MailTags 1.2.2 will continue to be available too under the same donation-ware conditions as before. MailTags 1.2.2 users can look forward to an update with minor bug fixes later this week.mailtags, mail.app, apple mail, productivity, tagging, to-dos, ical, workgroups, collaboration, IMAP

Apple Legal has been doing its best to take down screenshots that break its non-disclosure agreements, but I guess the sheer volume of posts almost guarantees that some will get through.

Spilled Cow has posted six screenshots of Leopard Mail (notes, making a to-do, a note with a to-do, a to-do list, adding an RSS feed and dispalying an RSS feed).

HardMac (Le Macbidouille) has more detailed shots of to-dos and to-do options.mail.app, apple mail, leopard mail, 10.5, to-dos, notes, rss feeds, screenshots, apple

After a week in which the blogosphere dissected the keynote from every angle, frantically hunted for new hidden features in Leopard and evaluated how much of it is really new and/or useful, it’s time for a round up of the “general view” on Leopard Mail.

HTML Templates suck

The new HTML templates were never going to be a big hit in the blogosphere. MacSlash writer acaben speaks for many :

…they’ve now made it EASIER to send out craptastic HTML email. Apparently, mail.app didn’t suck hard enough as it was, so they had to spend all of their engineering dollars making it as annoying as possible, instead of, you know, making it work well. WTF.

Pierre Igot at Betalogue has a similar view :

Real Mail users in the real world are just hoping to get decent performance and a proper interface for managing tens of thousands of archived emails. Instead, we get “30 professionally designed stationery templates.” Yet more crappy HTML email! Grrrrreat.

I share the same dislike of HTML in email, but I think it is time for bloggers to pause and take a collective deep breath. We are not like other people. Other people like HTML email a lot. Jim Puls attempts a defence of the new templates and HTML in email:

HTML e-mail exists so that you might be able to communicate with people better by more richly expressing yourself.

Productivity enhancements

Notes, to-dos and the inclusion of RSS feeds for extra information-processing focus were greeted more positively. Although these features are not new and are (partially) available to Mail users now through the work of third-party developers, Apple will present them in a more polished form. When Apple eats its children, it always makes a good job of the meal (remember Konfabulator? RIP).

Overall, restrained praise is the general tone. These things are welcome but not overwhelming.

Chris Clark at decaffeinated represents the tone of many blog posts I’ve read in the last week:

The system-wide ToDo server is a very cool idea, but everything else about the Mail preview perturbs me. Stationery? Great, more (no doubt standards-ignorant) HTML email. Thank god for hidden preferences that force plain text display by default. A notes mailbox is pretty cool, so long as it plays nice with IMAP servers (I worry that it won’t), and RSS is a gimme. Next.

Paul Thurrott seems conflicted . On the one hand he says the new features are welcome; on the other:

Apple’s Mail application (often called Mail.app in reference to its beginnings on the NeXT platform) is being updated with some truly lame features: Stationary, notes, to-do notes, and RSS. Ugh. These aren’t major features, and they’re certainly not worthy of the time Jobs gave them during the keynote.

Macworld presents an extended evaluation of Leopard Mail. It likes the new features but remains unimpressed in general:

New bells and whistles, such as Notes, To Dos, RSS support, and stationery templates, expand the program’s reach and make it more of a multitasking tool. However, if you’re using a third-party e-mail application because you need powerful management features not offered by Mail, these additions alone aren’t likely to change your mind.

mail.app, apple mail, leopard, views, HTML, to-dos, notes, preview, keynote, apple

Will Henderson has written a “micro-app” that lets you quickly email a note, to-do or reminder to yourself in Mail.app.

He got frustrated by iCal’s to-dos, which didn’t quite do what he wanted, as he explains:

For a while now, I’ve been sending myself todos via iCal, but that’s not good enough – it requires a net connection and it doesn’t cover many usage scenarios, i.e.
• I want a task that doesn’t have a particular due date
• I want a task that can be filed or tagged (using Mailtags , of course)
• I want searchable notes attached to my task

Despite a small bug (notes are sometimes sent to the Drafts folder not the Inbox), the app does a good job.

You can collect the notes or to-dos in a smart mailbox easily. A condition that matches “Yourself” as a recipient catches them all.

This may appeal to people who are interested in using Mail.app as a personal information manager or as a “Yojimbo substitute” as well as those who like Will want more flexible and taggable to-dos.

Note to Self is donation-ware and is available from Will’s web site .productivity, information manager, mail.app, apple mail, notes, to-dos, iCal, helpful apps

Terry posted a comment today in an earlier Hawk Wings post about the formal syntax for creating iCal events and to-dos with the Quicksilver iCal plugin. It was news to me; it might be to you too.

Although the iCal plugin does its best to parse the date, time and content from your text string, you can help it along.

The documentation for the Quicksilver iCal plugin sets out the correct syntax. For events, it expects your text to look like:

For to-dos:

NB: Those long dashes are actually two hyphens.

Adding exclamation marks increases the priority of the to-do.

UPDATE: As Cooper points out in the comments, you need to enable Quicksilver’s advanced features option to make this work:

You will also find in the documentation some feature requests for the plugin that would be terrific, like the ability to mark to-dos done or add attendees.quicksilver, ical, events, to-dos, syntax, format, plugins, productivity

Georg Klein has updated his Mail2iCal AppleScript which creates an iCal event from a selected Mail.app message.

The new version (1.5) now also creates to-dos, incorporating the function of his Mail2iCalToDo script.

It also now comes with an installer and offers you the option at installation of nominating a default calendar for the events and to-dos.

When activated from the script menu, a new dialog lets you choose to make an event or a to-do from the message:

Behind the scenes, several bugs have been fixed and the script now saves its preferences in a standard plist file.

You can get Mail2iCal from Georg’s site , from MacUpdate or from VersionTracker .ical, events, to-dos, todos, mail.app, apple mail, applescript, mail2ical, productivity

Ethan Schoonover’s KinklessGTD is probably the most comprehensive, flexible, elegant and powerful implementation of Dave Allen’s Getting Things Done task management philosophy for Mac users. Others swear by the various GTD wikis now available.

EasyTask Manager offers something less ambitious that will appeal to many. It is a task manager based around the GTD schema which offers two-way syncing of to-dos and calendars with iCal.

The interface is nice and clean:

It is easy to create new tasks and projects, and assign contexts and priorities.

Syncing with iCal appears smooth and trouble-free with the 15 tasks to which the demo is limited (UPDATE: although see the comments for some bugs and niggles). Tasks can be marked as completed in either iCal or EasyTask Manager.

A Preferences pane allows you set a number of options for its interaction with iCal:

EasyTask Manager 1.5.5 was released yesterday, fixing a bug in the process of completing or deleting tasks and introducing an internal update facility for registered users.

It doesn’t have the power of some of the other implementations, but what is does offer, it does well. And it is cheaper. At USD 19.99 it costs less to run than kGTD, which requires you to own a full copy of OmniOutliner Pro (USD 69.95).

EasyTask Manager is available from the developer’s web site .GTD, getting things done, productivity, iCal, task management, to-dos, projects