Comments on: Thunderbird Tags

By: Leo Plaw

Leo Plaw — Thu, 12 May 2011 09:55:54 +0000

Thunderbird 3.1 is an improvement on tags. Yes they are useful, and can now be used for filtering. But if you say that is useless, then what shall we say of WordPress’ tags then?

By: GM

GM — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:40:25 +0000

I really like the tags feature on TB – I’d like to get rid of my folders altogether and solely use tags. Does anyone know if there is a way to undo clearing the tags on a particular message? I would hate to have a bunch of messages highlighted and accidentally hit “0″ (shortcut to remove all tags) – I could see that causing havoc to my message organization…

By: D.G.

D.G. — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 02:39:28 +0000

I too am frustrated with T-bird’s taging. I use tags as reminders but I want more from them than just nice colors.
I’ve used DreamMail4 and it has a very nice tagging system. I can tag the email and “set-to-top” and it will always “be in my face”, so I don’t forget it. It would be great if T-bird had this feature. Could someone write an add-on to do this?

By: Mark

Mark — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:11:01 +0000

The tag system is completely worthless. When I tag a message as important, I expect it to keep the tag for as long as I need aso that I can quickly find it again. Alas! as soon as I minimize the Thunderbird/Eudora window and re-maximite it, the tag vanishes and the message looks like any other. I would also expect it to ” to the top of the jump up” in the pane listing inbox content regardless of how I have my view set – it didn’t do it in the Thunderbird’s latest version and it isn’t doing it in Eudora. How annoying! One more thing – the Sunbird Calendar so joyfully touted on the Firefox site doesn’t integrate weith the e-mail client (Eudora 8.0) and the other one (Lightning), supposedly integratable and seemingly (from screenshots, perfect, integrates only in Firefox/Thunderbird up to 2.0. Come on, Mozilla went through so many updates and didn’t think to update the Lightning? What a shame. One more thing, since I’m venting – how come the various installed dictionaries don’t automatically recognize the languages they’re for in the e-mails being written? It’ so annoying to have ALL the text underlined with red wavy lines as if it’s full of errors – that’s how I miss the real errors and typos, so I hope y’all forgive me

By: Bill W

Bill W — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 06:22:04 +0000

Steve and James B have it right about tags. They are really useful. I would never go back to email without tags. You should try them out.

I can now stop using folders to organize my emails and just use tags in conjunction with saved searches. These saved searches are “virtual folders” and show up with the normal folders. A huge advantage is that now an email can reside in multiple virtual folders. Also, a virtual folder can include several different tags.

By: me

me — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 11:13:58 +0000

Try Tag The Bird from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/1832 … it’s tagging for thunderbird, could be better, but it’s a good start!

By: James B

James B — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 11:52:57 +0000

The tagging system really works for me. I about 10 clients and have created a search folder for each that doesn’t contain the tag ‘Closed’. Therefore, I basically have a folder for each client with things to do that doesn’t get clutter with emails that have been read, actioned, replied to etc.

Also, find it good for flagging particular emails such as job sign offs or important information – then use the view dropdown to find them quickly.

By: David

David — Mon, 28 May 2007 05:45:14 +0000

I completely agree about tags. I was looking/hoping for something like tags in del.icio.us which I think is how most people think about tags. Instead its just the old slow label system with support for adding your own new labels.

I do generally prefer TB2 though, nothing particularly impressive about it especially given the development time, but the performance of IMAP is greatly improved.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 23 May 2007 15:47:34 +0000

The tags/labels do make sense when used in combination with “saved searches”. In previous versions of Thunderbird saved searches operating on labels (as it was then called) took forever and ever, so in reality becoming useless. However, in TB 2.0 a saved search on tags/labels operating on 2.4GB of email stored on an encrypted partition in linux (using encfs) takes 1-2 seconds to display. pretty impressive and very usable.

So now I have tags such as “action required”, “action committed” and “waiting for reply” that in conjunction with paired saved searches allow me to immediately see all emails that I need to follow up on etc.

What I’m missing though is a feature to tag messages as I send them, e.g. tag a message with “reply requested” when sending it. As it stands now, I first have to send it and then go into the Sent folder and tag the message. Works, but it is easy to forget.

By: Brandy

Brandy — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:43:43 +0000

Tags would be useful for me only if I could assign them to people in my address book as well. Then I could make filters to move messages around depending on the tags assigned to the sender, if they are in my address book. Tagging folders might be helpful as well. It really surprises me to see them implement this “feature” without being able to tag other things!

By: Nico

Nico — Mon, 21 May 2007 05:31:34 +0000

Indeed, there is *a* views toolbar in TB2, only it is not the same as in 1.5, which is unfortunate. Now, I have to go through 2 mouseclicks instead of 1 to select a tag. (The tags went one folder level down in the dropdown box)

By: Erik Mallinson

Erik Mallinson — Fri, 18 May 2007 20:36:17 +0000

I’ve been using 2.0 for a while now (beta) and I have to say that when Seamonkey came out a couple months back using Thunderbird as it’s base but improving tags I was hoping it would make it into Thunderbird 2.0. It didn’t.

What are you missing? Tags that can be re-ordered. Color coding tags really doesn’t work in either one.

I used Seamonkey for a couple of months but couldn’t take it any more. Since then I’ve just revamped my email habits to stop trying to save any email and get it into a better system, ala Bit Literacy (http://bitliteracy.com/). Thanks Mozilla!

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 16 May 2007 17:03:11 +0000

Thanks everyone for the heads up on the views thing!

By: Paul Squires

Paul Squires — Wed, 16 May 2007 13:10:05 +0000

I migrated to TB2.0 largely for the tagging and I have to say it’s disappointing. I’ve been looking for something similar and the best I’ve found is a plugin for outlook, which is in closed beta and unavailable (SideFinder). There must be a way to replicate that for TB!

By: JF

JF — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:49:30 +0000

Thunderbird 2 also took away the views dropdown, which was an eminently useful feature, and the only way I can find to replicate it is to create search folders, which are of course are a lot clunkier.

No it didn’t, it just removed it from view by default. If you customize the toolbar, you’ll see the View drop down as one of the options to drag onto the toolbar wherever you want it.

I will, however, agree with the tagging.

By: Pete Prodoehl

Pete Prodoehl — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:12:05 +0000

Yes, they are “tags” in name alone. I don’t know why the hell they don’t just call them “labels” and get on to adding more important features instead of buzzwords.

By: Keith

Keith — Tue, 15 May 2007 17:58:44 +0000

Thanks Anders, that’s exactly what I need! It’s a shame I can’t see an easy way to put it back where it was in v1.x but the functionality is much appreciated

By: Neil T.

Neil T. — Tue, 15 May 2007 17:27:01 +0000

Seconding what Anders said, you can get the Views dropdown back by customising the toolbar. You can even move it around now – it’s not fixed in position as before.

By: Patrick Havens

Patrick Havens — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:43:47 +0000

What do you mean views dropdown is gone? I still have it?

Tags… well I never used them much, I do like that they now added a column which lists the tags a email has been tagged with (besides in the headers) so you can sort by tag.

The tag button up on the bar doesn’t do much for me… I still find myself right clicking and setting tags. I will admit that I like being able to set more then one tag on an email.

As a side note, it seems to do a better job on remembering sort state.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 15 May 2007 16:29:41 +0000

Agreed, I found the tags in Thunderbird to be absolutely useless – I certainly haven’t found a good reason to use them, except to colour particular emails of interest. Regarding the view drop down, I think they just hid it. I still have it on mine, if you right click the toolbar and press Customize, you can drag the view toolbar back to it’s original location.

By: Robin

Robin — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:23:18 +0000

I just use Gmail, especially with its push email capabilities. Consistent UI across platforms, and does everything I wanted. Oh, and it’s almost 3 GB of free space.

By: Harald

Harald — Tue, 15 May 2007 13:05:27 +0000

IIRC the “View” dropdown is still there, it’s just not in the default toolbar anymore. Right-click on the toolbar and pick “Customize…” and you should be able to get it back?

Unless of course you’re talking about a different “Views” dropdown, in which case you can ignore my pathetic ramblings

By: pundit

pundit — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:38:16 +0000

(changing = change + in)

By: Lance Willett

Lance Willett — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:38:01 +0000

Matt, I agree with your points on the new “tags” in Thunderbird, but don’t give up too easily on the Views dropdown.

I was upset after not seeing it in the default toolbar after the 2.0 upgrade (on Mac OS X), but found it soon. Go to View -> Toolbars -> Customize. Then drag the Views dropdown to your toolbar (I put it by the Stop button). I also made the buttons smaller so everything would fit well.

Bottom line: I have my precious views chooser back. I use it constantly, especially the “Last 5 Days” view and the “Unread” view.

By: pundit

pundit — Tue, 15 May 2007 12:36:35 +0000

I was taken aback by some of the changes too, starting from the changing the keyboard shortcut for New E-mail from Cmd+Shift+M to Cmd+N on the Mac.

(Clearly that was an infrequently used shortcut and no one would notice?)

If by “Views Drop Down,” you mean that drop down list where you can choose to view mails by their classification (All, To do, etc.) I was horrified when I found it gone too.

But, you can retrieve it by customising the toolbar at the top. Find it in the list of available widgets, and drag it back onto your toolbar.

Phew, that was most scary.