Tagging in Mail.app, by Jeffrey Veen

Tagging in Mail.app

An interesting new utility, MailTags, has been released by Indev Software recently that allows for tagging in Apple Mail.app. That is, an email comes in and you can use a side bar to give it a quick tag -- much like Flickr, gmail, or del.icio.us. And it does a whole lot more than that with contextual menu support, due dates, priorities, Spotlight integration: lots of candy for the organizing geeks among us.

Tagging is interesting to me when organizing personal data. I've always kept mail in folders; sometimes by date and sometimes by project. I've done the same for documents on my computer. But that's ultimately limiting. What if a message is about projectFoo and interfaceDesign? Tagging these things will multiple, arbitrary descriptions gets around that. Or at least starts to provide an alternative.

To be fair, MailTags isn't designed to do tagging the way most folksonomies are designed -- the unstructured tags are more "comments" than true tags. But it is certainly helps with searching, and is start towards new ways of navigation our data in the future.

Anyway, I haven't spent that much time with MailTags yet, but I'm a huge fan of their earlier work, Mail Act-On, which allows any Mail.app filter or script to be assigned to a key. Wow, what a time saver...

This entry was written by Jeffrey Veen and posted 29 August 2005 at 9:08 PM. It was filed under Information Architecture, Software. | View blog reactions

Comments

1. On 31 August 2005 at 11:25 AM John Zeratsky wrote:

Tags get most of the attention as social tools, but they have great applications for personal organization as well. The simple fact that they allow many-to-many relationships is huge.

2. On 4 September 2005 at 11:16 AM jjg wrote:

Jeff, can you elaborate on why you think MailTags doesn't support "true tags"?

3. On 6 September 2005 at 4:55 PM veen wrote:

Well, ultimately I don't think there is One Way of Tagging to Rule Them All. But I also don't think what MailTags means by "tags" and what the folksonomy people mean are really the same.

MailTags allows for freeform text in the comments field of their interface, but rely mostly on structured types of metadata that users must configure. Also, they don't have a specific browse/search functionality along the lines of del.icio.us or flickr -- I'd prefer to tag emails for a while, then see a list of the metadata values I've been using, then edit and adjust them. My experience with tagging systems has been that I do spur-of-the-moment tags, then quick fixes later. MailTags doesn't feel like that kind of system. Rather, I have to set up projects, then assign emails to them. That's a little like having archive folders, frankly.

That said, it's good step forward in personal information retrieval and simple organization systems. Careful archiving has never worked for me, so any progress like this makes me happy.