Thunderbird Tagging Extension
We need a tagging extension for Thunderbird. Urgently. It’s just a pain (and soooo “web 1.0″!) not being able to combine emails in an IMAP folder by other means than making yet another folder. I currently have a class whose mailinglist covers many different topics, and sometimes more than one in the same email. And even though there are only 30 emails so far, yet it has become near to impossible to find what I am searching for efficiently.
Wait – there is already a tagging extension available, right? Well, somehow. It’s called “Tag the Bird” and provides some sort of automated tagging approach for your email.
However, I don’t feel good about sending all my emails in full text to some sort of web service. No matter if I trust them or not. That’s maybe nice for one or two newsletters a week you want to condense to a handful of keywords on the fly (just to find out that the current issue focuses on dancing hamsters so that you can delete the boring thing before even looking at it any closer).
But apart from any automatic tagging approach, I suggest to write a Thunderbird Mail Tagging Extension that allows the users to manually tag their emails (and of course includes searching for the tags). The on-the-fly search field in Thunderbird would not only have to handle sender and subject then but also tags.
Considering large amounts of email in some people’s postboxes, it would be neat to store the tags in some sort of field that’s searchable by the IMAP server (for not having to download all of the emails in order to execute a search). Additionally, the server itself is the only logical place to store the tags as everything else would require an additional storage facility (file? WebDAV?) that would totally kill every aspect of portability — a step back to the times where POP3 was state of the art.
I could think of a custom email header called something like X-Tag or so. Still, I don’t know if this is a) “legal” with respect to the E-Mail RFCs (it should be, though, considering the vast amount of “X-” tags already used by all sorts of MUAs) and b) if these fields are efficiently searchable by an IMAP server.
Any comments to my raw, unformed “web 2.0″ 
thoughts?
Update: I just found out that somebody seemed to have some sort of similar idea already and announced to be writing a proposal on it soon.
Yeah. Who else is interested? I’d like to have this extension. My e-mail life has moved from lists to random encounters, so I’m casting about for a more flexible organization method.
The search facilities of my Dovecot IMAP server are very fast and powerful when combined with Thunderbird. It is capable of searching specific header fields, and I’ve toyed with creating an X-Tags header in some messages and searching on it.
I’ve found some example code where headers are added to a message in Thunderbird. It’s typical write-only XUL spagetti, though. Writing a Thunderbird extension is nothing to approach lightly.
Thoughts?
Alan, it’s nice that you already tested the ability to add and search for X-Tag headers. So, can you have several X-Tag headers, each containing of only one tag, or would we have only one X-Tags header with all the tags in it?
I hope, the ability to search for custom headers is the same for all IMAP servers.
Apart from that, it’s probably not terribly complicated to write such an extension? I never did that, though. But I think it would be fun.
How about opening a little project on sourceforge (or berlios.de, as I hate CVS
)…?
Anyone else up to help us write the extension?
Didn’t think about creating multiple tags. I’ll check and see if that works. My thought was to comma deliminate the tags like so…
,blogging,new orleans,professional,french quarter,
Then to search for French Quarter, I’d secretly search for ,french quarter,
Of course, if multiple headers with the same name works, that might be better, so long as a search will match the full tag.
Multiple tag headers works like a charm. This is going to be very easy. I’d like to check that it works with POP, or offline mailboxes as well.. Yup. This is gold.
All we have to do is put an interface on it. Cute.
I’m going to blog this before I get the project rolling. Let’s take our time doing this okay? I don’t like to be rushed on free stuff.
Oh, well done, Alan. Yes I’m fine with not rushing. So go ahead blogging it first.
I wrote Tag the Bird. Though it’s still a developement version you can already add your own tags to your mail. Sending your mail to the tagthe.net server for auto-tagging is already an option only (though turned on by default). What’s planned but yet missing is a searchable tag header and IMAP support (both of which should not be too much of a problem). I’m curious if you folks would like to contribute some more ideas and proposals for Tag the Bird (and code of course, if you want). So if you’re interested, you’re more than welcome to drop me a line (paul[dot]alexandrow[at]knallgrau[dot]at).
Paul
I will drop you a line. I’m thinking that we just add the tags via IMAP. I guess, it’s time to write up the game plan.
This sounds like a great idea.
Tagging emails in Thunderbird would be great. As you said, creating a X header for email messages is proper, according to the RFC. (That’s what it was designed for.) Searching for those header fields might be optimized on some mail servers, but probably not all of them. Anyway, it would definitivly be faster than doing a full text search of the message’s body.
I tried Tag The Bird and the concept is broken IMHO. You shouldn’t have to transmit any information to be able to add tags to your emails, especially not personal information! Also, as you mentionned, it doesn’t work with messages stored on a IMAP server, which is a pain. The IMAP protocol makes it really easy to update and add header fields, so there is no reason not to do that.
I have no idea how to write a Thunderbird pluggin nor do I have the time to do it, but this should be easy stuff to do. I hope a usefull tagging Thunderbird extension is released soon.
Thanks for the info.
[...] My modest proposal to implement tagging in Thunderbird. This is a proposal I said I’d write in response to a discussion at fredericiana in the comments of a post entitled Thunderbird Tagging Extension. [...]
Notice that I’ve written up the tagging implementation proposal. Follow the trackback in the comment above this one. I’m reading through Tag the Bird now.
Thanks Alan! I am gonna read your stuff, comment on it, and take a look on TtB also when I’ve got time. Unfortunately currently I am a little busy. Talk to you soon!
I so want this. Trying out Tag The Bird at the moment.
[...] I’ve established a Subversion respository at http://blogometer.com/svn/tbt for the Thunderbird Tagging project lead by Paul Alexandrow and Frederic Wenzel. The Thunderbird Tagging project has been discussed here in the Blogometer and at Frederic’s blog. I use Subversion on Windows, OS X and Linux, and can field and client questions. If Paul has a latest version of Tag the Bird, I can check that in for him, and post some notes on checkout. Posted by Alan Gutierrez Filed in Software Development, Aside [...]
I’ve found your blog as I was searching for solutions on tagging my mail. Later on I asked in the mozillazine forums, and it turns out that don’t need to do all the work. There’s already an extension that does everything that you want it to do. It’s called HeaderTools (latest version 0.56). Check out this thread for more information and how-to: <http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=406000>
Hope it helps, this is the nearly the perfect solution for me.
I already knew header tools and I was looking into some parts of its source code when I wrote the first version of TTB. Back then it didn’t work with the newest TB version, so I decided not to dig further into it. However, because it seems to work fine now, I definitely will have a look again. I don’t think it will replace a "true" tagging extension for TB – which is what we want to make – but a lot of technical problems we would encounter should be solved in their code already. Plus: We could re-use big portions of their code. We should check their license…
The photo fits perfect – nice!