Lately I’ve been on a gmail organization blitz. I added the Getting Things Done plugin, got a Remember the Milk account and the RTM gmail plugin and purged my inbox of 800 backlogged emails. Now I generally have an empty inbox and a couple of todo lists. The freedom from having to look at that endless page of old emails is amazing.
One thing that has been missing for me though is the ability to easily tag my emails in gmail. The Labels work ok, but attaching a bunch of labels to an email is time-consuming and cumbersome and often a tag list would work a lot better. I also find that I frequently have a hard time finding some emails even if I label.
I looked around a bit and there doesn’t seem to be a good gmail tagging plugin. The soution I have come up with is fast and simple seems to work pretty well…
To tag emails, I reply to the email I want to tag with a list of tags. That way my tag list ends up end up attached to the conversation and will show up in searches. It is a very quick and easy. The only shortcoming of this method (and this is a big one if you are absent minded like me) is that you have to be really careful when you reply to the email that you replace the senders’ email address with your own so you don’t send your list of tags to them rather than yourself.. could be embarrassing (e.g. mytags: loser co-worker, annoying, haha…).
Also note that you can create a filter that recognizes your tagged emails and marks them as read so you don’t get a new email when you tag your mail. The way to do this is to add to your email some unique text like “mytaglist:” before your tag list, then make a filter to mark any incoming emails with that tag as read.
Seems like it would be fairly easy to write a gmail plugin that would avoid the problem of accidentally sending the email to the last sender … anyone want to take this on? 🙂
Anyone out there have nay other suggestions or tips?
InfiniteWorld 