I'm always trying to find the best way to manage my email. For a very long time I've been using Thunderbird as the main mail reader for various reasons:
- It is available in Windows and Linux
- There is a portable version that runs on a USB stick
- There is a large list of extensions (though far less than firefox)
A problem with Thunderbird, though, is its clumsy use of tags. Up to version 2.0 the only way to manage one's mail was to file them into folders and subfolders. Versions pre-2.0 had the ability to tag mail according to a predefined set of 5 tags, each one able to highlight the email with a different colour. Here are the default colours:
- important
- work
- personal
- todo
- later
Most interesting of all, each tag had a shortcut number (1 to 5), so it was very easy to categorise the email as you read it.
Version 2.0 allows the possibility of adding your own tags, and to add several tags to each mail message. That's great, I thought, but there is one serious shortcoming: the tag labels are not stored in the imap server. Or so it seems, since if I define a new tag in my work computer and use it to tag an email, I won't be able to see the tag in my home computer.
So, really, Thunderbird 2.0 tags are cumbersome if you use several computers, since you would need to define exactly the same set of tags in every copy of your Thunderbird.
This is one of the main reasons that has led me to
gmail. This is Google's popular email service, and it does allow the use of tags. Google's tags are very flexible:
- Email messages can have multiple tags
- Tags can be arranged in hierarchies
- It is relatively easy to filter all messages by tags
Best of all, there is a Firefox extension called
GTDInbox that makes the interface with gmail so much more productive, enabling one to apply GTD (Getting Things Done) techniques to the email. But the Gmail interface, even after the extension of GTDInbox, is clumsy and slow. Really, what one needs is to use Gmail server via a local client like Thunderbird.
Is there a way to get the best of both? I think so. Gmail messages can be accessed via imap, and therefore it is possible to use Thunderbird to read Gmail messages without having to download them to the local computer. But currently I'm not aware of any extension that would make it possible to assign Gmail tags from Thunderbird in an easy manner. The way to filter by tags with the imap interface to gmail is via folders. For example, if an email is tagged "office", then Thunderbird will have a folder called "office" with this and all other messages that have that label. So it is very easy to filter by tag.
If one wants to assign a tag to a message, say "todo", one just needs to copy the message to the "todo" folder. If one wants to remove a tag, just delete the message from the folder that has the tag name. All of this and more is explained in this fine
blog posting.
Still, wouldn't it be better to assign and delete tags with the click of a button or using a drop-down list? and how does one know what are the tags associated to a particular email?
It would be an excellent idea to build a Thunderbird extension that makes the best of Gmail's tags. Is anybody up to the challenge?
