Sometimes it’s really great being a Mac user. You find yourself thinking, “What I could really use is something that [insert problem here]“, then you go out, do a spot of googling, and find that the whole thing has been solved perfectly by somebody before you who had similar thoughts, and the will to implement a solution[1].
Such was how I found MailTags. The problem in question was one I’m sure everybody is at least passingly familiar with: How to manage an ever-growing Inbox. My problem is that as an independent IT consultant, I get different e-mails from different customers and prospects, and need to keep track of them.
I tried flagging, and Smart mailboxes, but it was all just getting waaaay to complicated and labourious. So I started to think “I need to be able to label up messages with projects and priorities”. So a little bit of googling later, I came across MailTags, and the world was at peace.
It’s very cool. Define projects and keywords, hook it into iCal, define priorities. Then go define some Smart Mailboxes based on said keywords, projects and so forth, and suddenly, e-mails that need to be tracked get tracked, e-mails that need to be associated with a project get associated, and priorities can be applied.
It’s truly marvellous, and is easily the most useful plugin for Mail.app I’ve come across (Followed by GPGMail for seamless GPG encryption integration). That it’s also not nag-ware, and trusts you to be honest and donate if you like it, is a bonus. However, I was only too happy to donate to Scott Morrison at Indev.
[1] – For PC folk: Yes, I know you have a large selection of plugins and features that can be applied to whatever it is you use. However, there’s something altogether delightful when you repeatedly discover that plugins for Apple apps “just work” and integrate so well you’d almost have thought Apple themselves did it.
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