I don’t use Mail.App because I took the plunge into GMail a while back so that I would not be restricted to a single computer to keep track of email. I remember, it’s just email after all and GMail makes it the simplest for me. Anyway, I recently started using GTDGmail (http://gtdgmail.com/) which is an incredible add on in my humble opinion. I would suggest you look at the structure that they use and maybe take hints from that. I think that they have done a bang up job of implement GTD. Cheers.

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I use mainly the keywords related to GTD: GTDAction, GTDWaitingFor, GTDSomedayMaybe and GTDReplytoWaitingFor . Then I write in the notes filed the next action or similar note.

I have a nifty thing for waitingfor that I picked up somewhere: When I send a mail I’m awaiting an answer for I put the GTDWaitingFor keyword and puts wf inconspiciously at the end of the mail (among the stuff of my signature). Big chance is that when replied to, this text will be in the reply message and hence I have a mailing rule that automatically tags those messages with the keyword GTDReplytoWaitingFor. Having a smart mailbox containing all messages tagged with either GTDWaitingFor or GTDReplytoWaitingFor makes it easy to sift through what messages I’m still awaiting a reply and what has been replied. Cheers

Merlin, I will gladly accept your Coke (if it is diet) and the scent of steak has my fingers twitching.

Oddly, yesterday morning I moved one of my e-mail accounts back to Apple Mail and out of Entourage. I have used Entourage for one reason, its Projects feature with its ability to tie mail, contacts, schedule, notes, and clippings (I have never sorted out what clippings are, but since I rarely use the rest of MS Office for Mac there may be some benefit there).

My move to Mail was driven by two things: 1) Mail has more spring in its step than my e-mail laden Entourage; 2) I really wanted to try the newer functionality in Mail while getting the one mail account out of the Pavlovian Entourage mail ping, as this mail account is mostly picking up travel affinity programs I belong to, sale mail at stores I trust with my e-mail, and daily e-mail dumps of news and other non-work pertinent information.

A year ago I pulled my sparse use of Mail when I had tried Mail Tags and was not wowed enough to make me forget I like Entourage. Yesterday morning I had also downloaded Mail Tags 2 beta, which I set up and started kicking the tires. I wanted to see if it could replicate my manner of thinking in Entourage, but also extend that with tags. So far it seems it can work well as a replacement.

There are two things that are really important to me with mail and metadata (both very similar to Señor Pantalones): 1) Being able to tie mail to a project (client work, conference, or threads of interaction - e.g. mentoring, interviews, etc.) so that all the angles and communications are captured; 2) Being able to tie missing terms to a mail as well as placing hooks for facetted aggregation (e.g. travel, interview, contract, pitch, gift idea, etc.). These two are used as mostly controlled vocabularies as it makes aggregation or general retrieval much easier.

Where Mail with Mail Tags has it over Entourage is free tagging, which I really like as I can just use what is at the top of my head to add context to an e-mail, which is often what I am thinking when I am trying to retrieve it (for me Gmail scales horribly in this area, but Andy Mitchell’s GTDGmail is a much better interface than what Google came up with for tagging/labelling). The ability to free associate or add hooks for future tethers is really important for me. It allows me to connect ideas and mails that have hidden/masked correlations (synergy is the appropriate word but its use tends to get one banned from most discourse these days). I can add the tag SWeStI (for semantically well structured information) or cheap for good bargains.

I also use flags for following up, as my GTD is really frail and mostly approximates GTOMG (yes, “getting things, oh my god” - as in I blew that deadline or so that is what the title urgent meant in iCal to do as it missed the needed context from kGTD).

I am really interested in what Laura Lemay has in her follow-up.

I use mailtags and act-on to tame the mail beast. I use rules to assign project names and tags (client email > client project) to incomming mail. My folders are: 1. Urgent 2. Needs action 3. Waiting for reply / onhold 4. Idears 6. Customers 7. Office 8. Archive - Archive sent

I have also some smartfolders who are looking for e-mails with a specific mail tag. For example ‘hosting’. I use act-on to archive messages or change the e-mail status.

Mail Tags + Mail Act On + Smart Folders is amazing. I also use some other great smart folders “Unread”, “Last Day”, “Last Week”, “Last Month”, “Last 6 Months”, and “Last Year” as basic navigational aides. “Unread” basically becomes my “inbox”. I also have a Smart Folder based on each Project I have in my MT list, and use Act On to assign an email to a project.

I rarely need to do actual searching with this, as I can just go to a smart folder and spot what I need easily enough.

Like Donny Pauly, I wasn’t even aware I could do this. I had been hanging on to Entourage, until I digged a little after Merlin’s query, so Mr. Vander Wal’s comments are very useful to someone like me just beginning to catch on to GTD by means of 43 Folders.

I agree with CM Harrington. MailTags, along with Main ActOn and smart folders is amazing. I am getting my masters online and as a result I get a ton of email that needs to be reviewed and sorted quickly. Besides my Inbox, I have got to folders where I keep everything…one for school, and one for everything else. I have a series of Smart Folders set up to pull content with certain MailTags. I also have a Smart Folder for all unread mail. I check new mail there and have forced myself to get into the habit of tagging it after I read it. Once it is read and tagged, it sits in my Inbox. Then on Sunday, I use Mail ActOn to clear out the Inbox. Everything resides in either the Archive or School Folder, but can be reviewed in whatever Smart Folder is applicable.

Will someone please, please make a FinderTags or the equivalent?! I want my computer to be delicious too!!

Why doesn’t Devonthink have this feature?

Like with developing a very complex software system that involves over time, I find it helpful to perform regular refactorings of my taxonomy.

Sorry, I meant to say “system that evolves”.

I’m a grad student, so I have a tag for the classes that I TA, tags for the classes that I take, and a tag for each of my research projects. I then make smart folders based off the tag, so its very simple to search through the different subjects. Everything else remains untagged, though I do have more Smart Folders that are based on subject line, like for Calls for Papers.

Looking at my big list of complicated smart folders based on mail tags. Looking at the tiny text box for comments on 43 folders.

This may take a while.

Well Laura, I’d like to see your long list… I don’t use MailTags. I have it there in my preferences but somehow I just don’t use them.

I love, love, love Mail Act-On. That is cool. I have extensive dumb folders (as opposed to smart ones…) in my Mail, sorted initially by GTD type categories and then various archive-type categories, project, sender, year, media… I have about 15 Act-on triggers that shove mail into different mail folders and aid greatly in emptying that inbox.

It strikes me as quicker to do that kind of sorting using a key tap rather than assigning a Tag to an email…

I use categories like Tags in K.I.T., a YoJimbo competitor, chuck-all-your-stuff-in-here, software program. The -onomy is time related, since KIT is a storeroom of sorts.

Keep Monitoring Quiet Clearing Delete

All refer to different likely lifespans of stuff I keep in KIT, quiet being a “let’s have a look at you later” type lifespan. But time is an appropriate -onomy I guess for an app like KIT.

I have to think about Mail. But I’d love to hear what others are doing.

I wasn’t even aware I could do this. As soon as I explore it more I’ll make sure to come back and tell you how I use said Mail Tags.

I know this is a little off-topic, but in some sense, the more general requirement is how do you integrate/link your emails into your GTD system. Tagging is one approach. Another is to link to your emails via URLs, or some other linking system.

I wish there was an easy way to have a URL to uniquely identify an email message. I use TiddlyWiki to maintain my GTD data, and occassionally, it is nice to refer to a specific email message by a URL.

At the moment, all my business emails are on an IMAP server, so I have installed Squirrel Mail, which gives me the unique URL -> email reference, so in TiddlyWiki, I can click on a link to see the associated email of interest, that may be relevant for a project or task.

However, other systems such as gmail, from what I can tell, don’t give this to you easily, if at all. And as for other email clients… I suspect it won’t be easy.

Every piece of mail gets tagged with a keyword as soon as I finish it and it gets filed immediately into “archive.” If there is an action associated w/ the email (that lasts more than 2 mins) I create a todo via MailTags and assign it a project. I use one to two letter codes at the beginning of all my todos to specify their context so that when my todo items are alphabetized in iCal I can focus on my contexts easily (ie. E: for email, P: for phone, ER: for errand).

By using MailTags in this fashion I have GREATLY increased my productivity and am one major step closer to GTD Nerdvana. Seriously, it has been a HUGE help!

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.

[…] If it wasn’t apparent from my pathetic cry for help the other day, even I — one of your more theoretically productive persons in North America — struggle with what to call things. […]

I have three smart folders: ‘Action’, ‘Waiting For’ and ‘Reply To’ (just respond, no further action).

‘Waiting For’ is for tagging mail I sent and expect a reply to, so that I forget. I most often use the ‘Action’ tag/folder, which I also check for a weekly review.

A really cool feature in my opinion (it just takes too many keystrokes) is using the ‘iCal To Do’ and assigning the email to an iCal calendar that is also synced with Kinkless. That way ‘Action’ emails will show up automatically in Kinkless’ inbox. Unfortunately Kinkless looses the link to the e-mail (which the original iCal todo’s have).

Mail Tags rocks.

I am not a gtd practitioner, though I do subscribe to a zero inbox strategy. I set up separate calendars for my 4 biggest clients and everyone else is on my firm calendar. When I process mail, I assign the calendar, use the pulldown for the thing to be done: (calendar, review, respond, wait, forward, etc.) and I set a to do named the way I name everything: initials project thingtobedone date .

If I have specific things to review or questions to answer, I drop the text of the email into the notes section. While this is all a little cumbersome, it saved me when I could have lost a month worth of my calendars and notes when my mbp harddrive failed during a big backup. I had no harddrive but all of my docs and important emails were backed up to gmail and all of my calendars, to dos, and important notes were safely on my ipod.

I use MailTags mainly for the date scheduling of email. I do not use it to attach keywords or to attach things to projects. I have over 1 GB of old mail for ongoing projects, and there’s no way I’m going back to re-tag all that. So I stick to my highly coherent mail filing system (identical to the Finder system and the system I use on my Newton…). See http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/index.php/MichaelWittmann for more information on using the Newton, the desktop and so on.

MailTags gets used alongside Mail Act-On, which gives easy keystrokes to keep my inbox at zero. A “MasterIn” smart folder (explained below) tells me what to work on today and also acts as my processing location. One stop shopping.

Act-On has the following rules relevant to MailTags:

ctrl-t - respond TODAY (move to “respond later”) ctrl-1 - reply within 1 day (move to “respond later”) ctrl-4 - reply within 4 days (move to “respond later”) ctrl-s - respond someday (move to “someday” and … forget)

(Note that these are all left hand keystrokes… right hand might be on the mouse.) (I am leaving out the Act-On items that don’t deal with MailTags and instead focusing just on the MailTags pieces of my mail use.)

My smart mailbox is relatively simple, with the rules

Message is unread Message is in Mailbox Sent MailTags Due Date is before 1 days from today

The first two force me to process my inbox instantly. I have to decided on the email status as soon as it’s in my “MasterIn.” Also, I have to archive any sent mail I want to archive, as soon as it’s sent. This is often useful because I move the message I’m replying to (including an Act-On “clear all MailTags and flags” keystroke) into my archive, and then use opt-cmd-T to move the reply into the same mailbox right after.

the last rule in my smart mailbox puts in anything that has a due date of today or is overdue.

That’s it. I have about 20 to 50 messages I need to work on in a given day, and this system lets me deal with it quickly.

@sits

email messages generally have a message-id: header. MailTags has been set to recognize message://xyz requests where xyz is the unique id. This way, you can set the url in an app (say ical) to point to message://xyz and you can link directly back to the message.

Also Public beta 3 of MailTags 2.0 (which is due out momentarily — sooner if I don’t write comments) has apple script support. So now applescript workflows (such as kGTD) can be modified to also pull the project, keywords, priority and due dates set in MailTags. (and it will write them too)

Ghbdtn: How do you re-factor your tags?

I haven’t used MailTags, but if it’s using Spotlight, i.e. OS-level metadata tagging, then my more general (and thus off-topic) question is:

What interface do people use to do something like change a spotlight tag of “@monkey” to “@rhino” - system-wide? (All thousand files that I’ve tagged “@monkey” over the last year).

2 folders for my email, ‘action and ‘hold. I do not longer maintain an email archive. emaisl I want to keep I save as text files and put them into my general reference.

inside my ‘action folder I tag the emails as follows: write - reply with longish explanation surf - contains links I’ll chek out later work - have to do action outside of mail to proceed hack - contains knowledge I want to proceed when it’s the right time for it

i don’t use tags for specific projects, i just use a GTD-ish setup with 5 smart mailboxes…

INBOX-for all untagged mail, the messages colored green REPLY NOW-for e-mails that need a response or action ASAP, colored red REPLY LATER-for e-mails that need a response or action, but no rush, colored orange WAITING-e-mails that can’t be completed until something else happens first, orange REFERENCE-e-mail i want to keep for good, colored grey

here’s how i’m using mailtags 2.0 beta

I tag my emails with projects, then make smart mailboxes in for each project, plus a “due today” and a “due this week” folder.

I add keywords to emails if they involve a non-project topic but do not specifically mention that topic in the email.

then mailtags deletes all my tags and projects in preferences and makes me regret ever using it.

then i get over the frustration and manually add projects back to the preferences.

repeat 3x so far…