Thunderbird 2.0 RC vs. Mail (OS X): Tag your Inbox
The Thunderbird development team has released a Developer Preview of the next Thundebird Browser. Check out the Release Notes for Thunderbird v2.0b1.
While I’m using Thunderbird as my default email-client on Windows (Bootcamp), I’ve never switched to Thunderbird when running OS X. I always liked the clean GUI of Mail on OS X and I’m using some additional tools to organize stuff in my Inbox:
- MailTags: Add’s tagging to Apples Mail-App and iCal-support ($25)
- MailActOn: Attach keystrokes to Mail-rules (Freeware)
While some people preaching the theory of an empty inbox and trying to organize their messages by moving them to different subfolders, following a GTD-system, I have a slightly different approach:
- keep your Inbox as empty as possible
- backup all messages to a Gmail-Account
- Add tags to all messages that are currently in my Inbox
- Setup Smart Folders that sort the messages according to their tags
- Review these folders and creating next-step-actions (GTD)
Sorting messages to folders isn’t a good solutions, since a message can belong to more than one context: A message can be ‘work-related’ and you’re waiting for something to happen ‘waiting-for’ - so which folder is the right one? work? waiting4? work/waiting4?
It’s also easy to sort a lot of messages to different folders, so that it looks like your Inbox is empty, while there’s lot of stuff todo.
In short: Tags are the way to go!
I’ve checked out the new Thunderbird and it seems on the first glance that it might replace Mail+MailTags. A reason I want to switch from mail is, to run as much crossplatform compatible opensource software as possible.
MailTags for Mac is storing Tags and other metadata related to a mail-message in additional headers (even for outgoing mails). While Thunderbird adds a header named Tags it seems, that the header is not included for outgoing messages - at a first glance, there was no option to add a tag when composing a message and forwarding a tagged message seems to cut of the Tag-header?
I hope to see this fixed in the stable version and I also like to have both, labels & tags. Labels for states like TODO, WAITING, SOMEDAY… and tags for projects, persons…
So if you’re using Thunderbird already check out the new release candidate, if not checkout MailTags and wait for the next stable release of Thunderbird.
EDIT: Just to announce the next entry: No, I’m not using any of the iDoThisAndThat-Apps, but something like this:
Emacs + org-mode + remember + color-theme + epg + dlink
No clue what this is about? I’ll cover this later 