A Closer Look at Thunderbird 2.0’s Tagging
1:51 pm April 25th, 2007 by Sal Cangeloso
One of Thunderbird 2.0’s most hyped features is its tagging capability. Tagging is something that has been around for a few years now and has been perfected on sites like Del.icio.us. Despite it’s being one of the best buzz words to come out of web 2.0, it could be extremely useful for email organization. After all, Thunderbird has yet to come up with a good ways to organize old emails files (aside from the user setting up a series of folders within an account).
Tagging allows you to mark individual emails as “Important”, “Work”, “Personal”, “To Do”, or “Later” with the push of a button. Sound familiar? If it does that is because the previous version of Thunderbird had the same feature, except the tags were called “labels”. How quaint…
The difference between the old version and the new one is that now you can create your own tags (as many as you want) and give a single email multiple tags. The ones you create can be color-coded for easy identification and the first four your create will be assigned a number (only 1-9 are available as hot keys, though you can delete/edit the default ones).
So what do you do with these tags? Actually a few pretty cool things, like add a tags column to your emails so you can sort by the tags or you can use Thunderbird 2.0’s improved search to search for a tag. You can also group by the tag, if that is your preferred method of viewing your inbox and set up filters to tag incoming messages. That’s about it though.
What can’t you do? You can’t view a tag cloud, or create tags on the fly (as you would with Del.icio.us), or create a group of tags (though separate email accounts pretty much do this). You can’t select all the messages with a certain tag without using the search tool, something that Thunderbird, by default, hides away. There are a lot of other things that can be mentioned here, but you get the idea- the functionality of the tags is limited.
Overall the improved labels/tags help make Thunderbird easier to work with and emails slightly easier to organize, but they still have a long way to go before they get anywhere close to what people expect from a full-fledged tagging system. It is not a replacement for the extensive tree of folders that I have built up in Thunderbird in order to organize my old email. With some improvements it could replace all those folders (after a few hours of tagging) but that is going to require a few big steps, including easier tag creation, make it possible to work with many (at least a few hundred) tags, and finding a way to navigate between them, and so on. For now tagging is a useful option, but is little more than improvement on the old label system.
