Tag the Bird

Tag the Bird gives the power of tagging to your Thunderbird.

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Features
Author
Download
Feature requests
Frequentyly asked questions

Features

Tags are stored directly into a message's headers, so they are fully search- and forwardable.

You can use tagthe.net to auto-tag your messages via a secure connection.
Suggestion of frequently used tags. Add them without touching the keyboard.
3 different ways of searching and organizing tagged mail.
You can define an arbitrary number of external search engines (like Google or del.icio.us) where you can search for your tags.

Author

Tag the Bird was written and is currently maintained by Paul Alexandrow.

You can send me messages: paul[at]alexandrow[dot]org (PGP key available at pgp.mit.edu).
Before you contact me please see, if your question has not already been answered in the FAQs or your feature request is not already listed here.
Please understand, that I won't answer messages that have already been handled there.

Download

The download of the current version and screenshots can be found at Tag the Bird's site at addons.mozilla.org.

Feature requests / Known bugs

This is a list of requested features ordered by their priority. I made a few comments too.

IMAP server complains about empty lines when trying to save tags for a message
Working on it.
Attachements are lost when saving tags on IMAP accounts
Working on it.
In saved search folders, the header pane is not loaded and the edit tags dialog freezes
Working on it.
Setting tags without deleting/reimporting a message
Though I tried to hide this as good as possible, this really is what's currently happening: When you change a message's headers, the message is deleted and reimported again. Certainly not the best solution, but the only one I could find when I started to work on Tag the Bird. One guy complained, that this changes the order of his mail, since he used 'received' rather than 'date' for ordering. I'll see if there's some other way to do this by now.
The pane which holds a message's metadata is not shown after searches and in saved folders
I'm currently still trying to find the reason for this, since I never was able to reproduce this behaviour. Any further information on when exactly this happens is welcome.
Searching for tags in the QuickSearch
Currently, if you search for a tag it is displayed in the quick search bar to give you some visual information about your current view. However, it's more ore less a fake, because searching for a tag by entering it there is not possible yet. Task: add 'Tag' as option in the bar's dropdown menu and let tags be searched from there.
The filter view option should not replace the current filter
When you are in a filtered view and click a tag, the current view get's replaced by a new view filtering for the tag. I'd like the new filter just being added to the current filter.
Tagging multiple messages at the same time
The problem with this is, that there are a number of performance and stability issues when it comes to working with multiple messages at the same time. But I definitely want to have it - it just might take some time.
Global taglist/tagcloud
The problem here is the way how tags are stored (in a message's headers). Unfortunately Thunderbird is not like a cool message database, where you can do some nifty WHERE clauses, so there are basically two options: 1) Loop through all messages everytime the global list should be displayed. That's not an option, because that would be very time consuming, especially with IMAP accounts. 2) Create some kind of a caching mechanism for tags that's only updated when a message is added/updated/removed. That's probably the way to go. However, it's not too trivial to catch all CRUD operations to keep the cache clean and synchronized. So because of the complexity of that topic, this request has a low priority for now.
Grouping tags
One guy sent me this requests where he wanted to be able to group tags with 'supertags' and of course to navigate through all this. I have to say that this sounded really good and it would be cool to have, but honestly: it's just a little to far from what is commonly known as tagging and it would be much more work than what I have time for. Sorry.
Interoperability between Thunderbird's built in tagging and Tag the Bird
Tag the Bird was created long before Thunderbird had it's own tagging support (that's the primary reason why Tag the Bird was even made). Unfortunately Mozilla decided to go a quite different way on how to store their tags. So in short: those two systems are not really compatible and there are currently no plans to make Tag the Bird compatible with Thunderbird's own tagging.
Keyboard shortcuts for tagging operations
Will be included in a future version. Should be customizable.
Recently/Frequently used tags
Will be included in a future version.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Filtering the view on IMAP accounts does not get me any results, though I'm absolutely sure that there should be some.
A: As far as I can tell, this is a bug in Thunderbird itself. I'm afraid users experiencing this problem have to use 'Extended Search' for Tags for the time being instead. Hint: You can set this as the default left-click option in Tag the Bird's preferences.
Q: Where can I find Tag the Bird's help file?
A: Either via the menubar 'Message' > 'Tag the Bird' or via a message's context menu. This might vary in your translation.