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.
June 29th, 2008 at 3:15 am
The photo fits perfect – nice!
May 10th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
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…
May 10th, 2006 at 9:00 am
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.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
[…] 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 […]
April 10th, 2006 at 9:21 am
I so want this. Trying out Tag The Bird at the moment.
February 21st, 2006 at 4:01 pm
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!
February 21st, 2006 at 1:32 pm
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.