43 Folders

Back to Work

Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.

Join us via RSS, iTunes, or at 5by5.tv.

”What’s 43 Folders?”
43Folders.com is Merlin Mann’s website about finding the time and attention to do your best creative work.

Vox Populi: How are you using Mail Tags?

I open the floor to all of you on a question of particular personal interest to me: How are you using Mail Tags?

While my uses of it to date have been helpful, I keep getting the feeling I'm not getting all that I can out of it -- especially since the ability to associate Projects, Priorities, etc. to a message could make for some really enticing Smart Folders.

I wonder if my question is ultimately more taxonomic in nature -- ultimately more about Spotlight in general or Tags in very very general: When tagging items on your Mac, what kind of '-onomy' are you using? How strictly do you enforce your vocabulary? What are the best practices for someone who's new to this?

Confidential to Mr. Thomas Vander Wal: if you turn up here and school me a bit on this, I’ll totally buy you a Coke. If you write a guest post on it, I’ll buy you a beefsteak and two cocktails. Seriously. Steak.

jrk's picture

Thus far, I'm with Sr....

Thus far, I'm with Sr. Pantalones: I love MailTags (and MailActOn even more), and strongly support the IMAP store developments, to the point that I gladly paid to support particularly its future development, but I simply haven't found myself able to trust.

And I'm the kind of guy who runs many of my day-to-day apps freshly built off trunk, so this doesn't reflect some intrinsic computing conservatism. I've simply noticed inconsistent behavior too many times to actually build a trusted system around it. (And, even before my first unexplained data loss, I fundamentally didn't trust client-side metadata stored in an ephemeral, Spotlight-managed index for an IMAP cache directory, hence my interest in proper IMAP integration -- this basically leaves MailTags at the mercy of both Mail.app and the mds engine to treat what they consider caches/ephemeral data with greater care than I imagine their designers ever intended.)

So, as it stands, I just use it to place "hints" -- metadata which is useful but not life/system-critical.

 
EXPLORE 43Folders THE GOOD STUFF

Popular
Today

Popular
Classics

An Oblique Strategy:
Honor thy error as a hidden intention


STAY IN THE LOOP:

Subscribe with Google Reader

Subscribe on Netvibes

Add to Technorati Favorites

Subscribe on Pageflakes

Add RSS feed

The Podcast Feed

Cranking

Merlin used to crank. He’s not cranking any more.

This is an essay about family, priorities, and Shakey’s Pizza, and it’s probably the best thing he’s written. »

Scared Shitless

Merlin’s scared. You’re scared. Everybody is scared.

This is the video of Merlin’s keynote at Webstock 2011. The one where he cried. You should watch it. »