I’m just going to come out and say it: I want the ability to tag my email. I know, I know it sounds like I’m jumping on the tagging bandwagon. So what, I want to be able to tag my email. I really only have one reason for this request, to make email search better.
More and more searching for emails has become better at finding old information than the traditional hierarchy method. Sure Gmail, Thunderbird and Mail on Mac OS X have popularized this idea, but it goes beyond that. With the desktop search features heating up, most of them supporting searching email stored on your system, we need to have betters ways for search engines to rank our data. This is about finding the information you need as quickly and easily as possible.
Another point I want to make clear, I’m not interested in pushing email tagging as a replacement for hierarchy storage of email. If you want to go all the way and have one big archive folder with lots of tagged emails, fine. If you want to create a folder tree for you email, that is fine too. Tags should be used to enhance what were are doing, not necessarily replace it.
How about some nuts and bolts stuff, how should email tagging work?
Where should email tags be stored?
My first thought on this is in the headers. So far I still think this is the best place for them. When an email client adds or removes a tag the headers get changed accordingly and the message gets updated on the server (if they are using something like IMAP). I’m not sure what format would be best for these tags, for now I’d envision something as simple CSV (comma separated values). This would allow for spaces, but probably not newlines. I think embedded newlines in the headers would break things.
We’d have to come up with a new header, perhaps x-tags?
What email clients could do with tags.
Once we get tag support in email clients there are a couple of things I’d like to see. The obvious one is the ability to add, remove and edit tags for a given email. It should keep a running list of tags you’ve already used so that you can pick from a list. Yes, it could even generate a tag cloud if you like. A plus would be the ability to suggest tags based on content of the email and how you’ve tagged similar emails in the past. Maybe an autotag feature, that looks at the content of the email for words and terms that match tags you’ve used in the past and selects those for you. From there you could then refine what tags you want assign to the email. For bonus points I’d like Procmail to have some these abilities too, that way your email server could do some basic tagging for you.
Email clients should provide some additional smart folders also. A smart folder called tags could have subfolders that correspond to each tag you’ve ever used. You should be able to sort these alphabetically and by frequency (most commonly used tags at the top or bottom). Bonus points for the ability to drag and drop these smart tag subfolders to do searches. So dragging the ‘work’ tag subfolder onto the ‘sql’ tag subfolder should automatically do start a new tag search subfolder that contained only emails that have those tags. By dragging the ‘mysql’ tag subfolder onto it, the search should be refined even further.
When performing a free form search in email clients any tag matches should get increased importance. If I happen to use the word ‘oracle’ in a search and it is also one of my email tags, then emails with that tag should be ranked higher than emails without it.
How to make this happen.
I suppose someone should write an RFC on email tags for starters. That will outline the technical issues involved and allow vendors to start commenting and working on implementing these features. It would be really great to see someone like GMail support this because once they turn this feature on then everyone will have access to it. It also isn’t that far away from their label feature. Other good targets would include open source projects like Thunderbird and Squirrelmail.
It’s 2005, I hope that I don’t have to wait until 2010 before email tagging becomes widely available.