MailTags for Apple's Mail.app
MailTags is an incredibly useful tool that could be the envy of your friends running other operating systems. MailTags allows you to add custom tags, priorities, deadlines and notes to email messages. The upcoming MailTags 2.0 (which is now in the beta testing phase) stores these additional attributes to emails not in a proprietary database, but in the email itself by modifying the email's headers on the IMAP server. MailTags also extends the SmartMailboxes of Mail.app with the capability to use the MailTags information (keywords,priority, etc.) as search criteria.
So far, my main application for MailTags is to get rid of a large collection of subfolders for archiving my email but preventing the chaos of one big unstructured archive folder. My new approach is to tag the email with suitable keywords and store all emails I would like to keep in the same archive mail folder. Using SmartFolders I can now create archive mailfolders that group archived emails based on selected keywords. Since a message can have multiple keywords, messages can be part of many smart archive folders. Hence, this approach nicely solves the problem that it is hard to uniquely assign each email a distinct archive folder and prevents the potential chaos of a large, unstructured archive folder.
Brett Porter has written a nice blog entry on his personal MailTags setup which is tightly integrated with MailActOn. MailActOn is another indispensable Mail.app plugin, which I use heavily. It allows you to define custom hot-key commands for Mail.app. I think I will borough a couple of Brett's ideas to improve my personal email workflow.
If you are also using MailTags and MailActOn in some interesting way, I would be glad to learn more about it in the comments to this post.
Written March 27th, 2007