Email and workflow part 1: tagging your emails
Published by on July 17th, 2006
Every now and then I come across something which is magnificently useful in organising my wholly disorganised self. Email is a particular problem. If everyone used accurate and relevant email subjects and stuck solely to those subjects within the email, all would be well, but life is never that good.
Tagging an item, be it an email, a file, or a folder, with metadata offers a world of opportunity to organise, categorise and find what you want, when you want it - and filter out all the other irrelevant stuff. In OSX you can easily do this in the Finder by creating Spotlight comment tags (Quicksilver - yes, it’s way more than a launcher - can help you organise and apply these) or using a application such as SpotMeta.
Email, however, relies on creating complex sorting and filtering rules and to group information together effectively, the moving of messages between different mailboxes - even OSX Mail’s Smart Mailboxes are not quite enough on their own. What we need is a means to independently tag email messages based on one’s own organisation scheme.
Enter MailTags.
MailTags adds functionality to OSX’s Mail.app to help you organise and filter your inbox, and in a way which limits the need to physically move messages around - which can be an issue if you are using multiple IMAP accounts.
It adds a small tag icon in the upper right of your email window which triggers the MailTags controls you see to the left which is also visible in your new message window. You can add user defined keywords (I use the standard GTD style keywords here), tag it to a particular project, attach the email to an iCal To Do, add a date, priority, notes… The tags are invisible to anyone but yourself.
What’s more, MailTags adds additional criteria for searching, filtering and SmartMailbox definitions so that new SmartMailboxes can be created which show only messages with, for example, a particular tag, or project, or perhaps those with an upcoming due date.
As with every tagging solution, the value in the system is entirely dependent on the amount of continued effort the user puts in - the more tags there are, and the more relevant they are, the stronger the system becomes.
I have been using MailTags for only a day or so, but it is clear it is going to play an important part in getting me just that little bit more organised.
MailTags is free (donationware) and available from http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html. Also available from that site is Mail Act-On, which is a perfect accompaniment to MailTags and which I’ll cover in a future post.
UPDATE: Since installing MailTags there has been a noticable increase in the time Mail takes to build a SmartMailbox view each time one is clicked. This is likely the result of Mail now having an increased number of potential filters to search through. The delay is slightly annoying but the benefits of using MailTags most certainly outweighs this. I genuinely feel my email inbox is getting organised!
3 Responses to “Email and workflow part 1: tagging your emails”
July 21st, 2006 at 9:21 am
I’ve installed it but I don’t see no tag thing added to any part of my email! Annoying..
July 21st, 2006 at 9:24 am
strike that. restarted mail, there it was.
July 21st, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Welcome to the world of email organisation, Mark