Email tagging

Filed under: Rant | 4 Comments

Now that tagging is all the rage for online apps, why don’t we have it for email yet? Instead you have to use arcane search that usually brings up no messages or about 1000. These days, the same company can have several different domains (PR reps, ad sales, corp, etc) so there is no reliable and fast way to search for all recent communication with X company. Full text searches for the company name sometimes work, but usually bring way to many results and take forever.

For example, I could take a message from a PR rep from Verizon Wireless with "verizonwireless pr" and find it easily again. With a simple UI I could make rules for find all messages with this tag and that tag, or this tag and not that tag. Would be heaven.

(Gmail is close with Labels, but that’s just "tag like" categories. I want real Flickr/del.icio.us like tags).

Read the latest posts

4 Responses to “Email tagging”

  1. Sunny says:

    I like the idea, but tagging all your email will be a pain. It has to be automated or the search has to improve.

  2. dowingba says:

    I’m not sure I understand how Gmail’s “labels” are any different from tags a la flickr.

  3. Jon Gales says:

    Labels are not like tags because they are meant to be categories. You need to set them up before hand for example. And they are only handy if you have a handful (since you have to choose from the already existing ones). It’s a pain to use more than one, multiple times of going to the drop down.

    There is a reason why del.icio.us and flickr let you type them free form.

  4. Joshua says:

    What we need is an add-in for Outlook that adds a “tags” field, and then makes that a searchable field in the “find emails” bar/dialog.
    Making virtual folders for a particular tag or tags would be easy, as would auto-guessing of appropriate tags (ala del.icio.us posting).

Leave a Reply to Jon Gales