*hypf*

For quite some time now I want tagging of mails instead of hierarchical storage. Thunderbird 2 claims to support that, even with IMAP (which is rare, even more so than tagging mails itself). The feature used there is IMAP keywords which seems to be still a draft, though. However, Thunderbird comes with five tags predefined: Important, Work, Personal, To Do and Later. I did not intend to use them. I'd rather like to categorize similar to my folders, that means tags like Sent, Received in the first place. Furthermore a tag for each person I wrote the mail to or receivde it from (conversations) as well as content tagging. That should allow me to easily categorize my mails like I did before but also allow for conversation reading and quickly finding a certain mail.

So far the theory. First of all, Thunderbird never gave me easy access to the tag management (buried somewhere in the options, but inaccessible from the context menu or Tags dropdown. Defining own tags worked and they are basically stored on the server, however I would have to set up the exact set of tags on the other machine I am using this account from as well. Definitely cumbersome as I expected tags to be solely stored on the server (except for local caching) and not the client. Apparently I was wrong. The Remove all tags menu entry also only removed the tags the client was aware of, instead of all tags associated with the message.

Also I wasn't able to replace the folder view with a tag view. Tagging with keyboard is nice but I'd have to remember all tags and their associated numbers (which won't happen with the number of tags I had in mind). What I'd really like would be a view that organizes messages not by folders but by tags and threads. Thunderbird fails with the first view already.

I currently have some 12,000 mails archived and with some people I have exchanged more than 1,000 mails and finding a single one is pretty hard. I certainly hope for more support for tags in mail clients for the future. As of now, Thunderbird isn't adequate for people with more than one machine (and honestly, where'd be the advantage of IMAP when you read mail only on one computer?).

UPDATE (2008-01-02 05:43): Tried out Mulberry but it only supports up to eight tags (and it's downright ugly). So another client down. Claws mail stores tags only locally and only in the latest version (The gpg4win port is ancient and doesn't work on Vista, at least not here).

UPDATE (2008-01-02 08:35): Read up on RFC 3501. Tags can actually contain arbitrary bytes, except a few forbidden ones (which include things like parentheses, space and a few others). This means we could get one-word Unicode tags via Punycode, actually. Another thing to note: Thunderbird's behaviour on encountering unknown tags is probably intentional (though stupid in my eyes) and there should be no need for it, except for the fact that you will only get the tag name on the server instead of the one you defined in your client (they can and probably will differ, especially if you included forbidden characters or renamed the tag).