MailTags: A New Way of Organizing Email

For most of us, Email is a very important part of our lives. This is why organizing Email is very important. Most of us probably just have a few folders set up (or just one!) to put our old Email into. Well, that is the old way. The new way is with indev’s MailTags.

MailTags is not a standalone-app, it is a bundle that expands Mail.app’s features. So, once you install it, you can access its features directly from Mail.app. The main point of MailTags (as expected) is tagging your Email. Tags can help you find Email faster, organize better and allow for that sense of Email harmony. Once you have installed MailTags, you will have a new Mail.app preference pane (called MailTags). Here, you can edit your projects and tags and access preferences for things like IMAP and colors. This is not, however, where you will be doing any tagging. Tagging is done in Mail.app’s main window.

As I said above, the actual tagging gets done in the main window of Mail.app. After you have installed MailTags, you will see a little tag icon on the upper-right-hand corner of every Email in your library. If you click this, you will see the ‘tagger.’ This is where you enter project, keywords, Tickler Date, Color, To Do or Event information and notes. You should create projects for specific things like work, school or Macworld. Keywords are actually less specific than projects. You could create tags for things like chats, receipts or mailing lists. Although it seems confusing that tags would be the more general thing, and not projects, it is true. A Tickle Date is a GTD (getting things done) term. It is basically just a due date, so, if you want to respond to an email by a certain date, this is where you would put it. If you want to add a new To Do or Event in iCal pertaining to an Email, just click the corresponding button under the To Dos and Events section. There is also a little checkbox at the bottom of the panel called Show as Subject which allows you to show your notes for the Email as its subject in Mail.app.

Not only can you edit one Email at a time with MailTags, but you can also edit more! To do this, just select the Emails whose information you want to edit, then right-click. At the bottom of this popup, you will see items like Add MailTags keyword, and these are what you click to add the information to all of the Emails.

MailTags also adds a few nice features to your Mail rules. Once you have installed MailTags, many criteria and actions are added to the rules section of Mail.app’s preferences. You can now perform actions on messages based on things like Tickle Date, Project and Keywords. You can also set Keywords, Project and Tickle Date based upon certain criteria. Not only can you create rules with these added features, you can also create Smart Mailboxes. You just click the [+] button at the bottom of Mail.app and click New Smart Mailbox, and you set it up the same way that you did with rules. As you had probably been thinking, MailTags would take a lot of time to use, and would even slow you down… except, you don’t have to do it all by hand, you can use rules or even Mail Act-On.

MailTags also adds functionality to the sorting of your Emails. In Mail.app’s Table View of messages, you can now view items like Tickle Date, Keywords or even if it has been ‘MailTagged.’ You can then sort by these items making it even easier to find what you need.

indev’s MailTags retails for $29.95. It drastically extends the functionality of Mail.app for sorting and organizing. It makes tasks that used to be hard a breeze. If you value your Email and your time, you must try out the 21 day trial and tell us what you think.

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