[Design] MailTags

[Mimi Yin]

I realized I hadn't responded to this. I think my irritation with  
MailTags has mostly to do with the defaults it has OOTB:

+ Mail Tags pane is always open (which eats up a lot of real estate  
and occupies a lot of mental cycles)

+ The pane is complex with 7 fields of varying sizes and shapes,  
inconsistent font sizes, weird icon proportions, funny alignment  
scheme which causes gaps of negative space in some places and lack of  
appropriate margins in others. I don't expect that everyone notices  
these things in particular, but the overall effect is that it catches  
your eye more than it needs.

+ MailTags *doesn't* show up in your Preferences panel unless you:
1) Click into the Keywords panel, at which point a checkbox for 'Add  
to preferences' appears
2) You check off 'Add to preferences'
This was truly bizarre.

Most of the time I don't need add metadata to my mail and so until I  
discovered the Preferences checkbox, I couldn't figure out how to set  
the default to "closed".

At a higher level however, I think it ends up turning a relatively  
simple UI concept (tagging) into something way too heavy-weight and  
in your face. I understand that when you're shipping an add-on to  
another app, you want to make the most of it because it's the only  
part of the interface you have control over, but tagging UI really  
shouldn't take up 20% of my detail view.

This is in-line with what a couple of other people have said about  
liking Gmail's labeling UI. It's discrete and easily accessible, but  
only on an as-needed-basis.

However, I think the drop-down is still somewhat labor-intensive and  
there isn't an easy way to define new Gmail labels. Also, all labels  
automatically end up in your sidebar, which tends to discourage  
people from labeling, lest it makes their sidebar navigation un- 
usably overcrowded.

Mimi

On Jan 11, 2006, at 12:10 PM, Ted Leung wrote:

> So in today's IRC office hour <http://wiki.osafoundation.org/script/ 
> getIrcTranscript.cgi?date=20060111> there was a side discussion  
> about tagging mail.   There is a plugin MailTags <http:// 
> www.indev.ca/MailTags.html>, for OS X's Mail.app that allows you to  
> locally tag messages, and then search, create smart mailboxes, etc  
> based on tags.  Unfortunately, it does not propagate those tags  
> into sent messages, so you can't tag messages for someone else.
>
> Mimi commented that it made her crazy, and several people were  
> interested in hearing her reasoning, etc.  So this message is a  
> place to hang that thread.
>
> ----
> Ted Leung                 Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
> PGP Fingerprint: 1003 7870 251F FA71 A59A  CEE3 BEBA 2B87 F5FC 4B42
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