Comments on: Tagging Mail with Events or Tasks

By: Murali

Murali — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:43:03 +0000

If you want to add notes to the emails, then try Xnote at

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/3093
It adds xnote tag to the mail, making it easy to find later.

By: Bryan Clark

Bryan Clark — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:35:06 +0000

Aharon: Right on! I think that’s the direction we need to look at.

Dan: I think we’re on the same page with attaching calendar events and todo items to emails. Perhaps “tagging” is the wrong term, but connecting the two such that you can search and sort by either.

Joshua & poelcat: great links! thanks for the pointers, I should spend some more time reading over the chandler projects blog and notes.

will: i’ve never seen the location based tags before. I’m wondering if the sub tags are like project tasks? The is-a relationship makes sense and it also makes me wonder if a deadline for those tasks make sense as well. Lots to think about!

By: poelcat

poelcat — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:19:55 +0000

Wow! Some really interesting convergences here that I’ve been thinking about and watching for a while.

You seriously need to read (if you haven’t already)
“Dreaming in Code” by Scott Rosenberg.

http://www.dreamingincode.com/

There was a recent post on the Chandler blog talking about integration with Thunderbird. http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/01/18/thunderbird-plugin-for-chandler/

And interestingly enough Chandler explored the GTD email road too: http://blog.chandlerproject.org/2008/03/14/chandler-and-gtd/

By: will

will — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:18:35 +0000

I use tags that are:

- project based (everything in my life is a project and each project is a set of projects)
- location based (home, work, Worcester, store, …)
- priority (super important, not very important, could care less)

It’s interesting to note that like Aharon, my project tags are related into projects and sub-projects. Is it interesting to have tags related to one another with “is-a” relationships?

By: Joshua Lock

Joshua Lock — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:09:33 +0000

Hi Bryan,

Sounds like you might want to take a look at Chandler[1] from the OSAF.
I’ve not actually used the software properly yet but from reading Dreaming in Code it sounds like you might like their “siloless” design for “stamping” items with different properties.

1.http://chandlerproject.org/

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:07:12 +0000

I don’t know if this is what you meant, but I’ve wanted to link disparate objects that are nevertheless related somehow (like a calendar event and an email) for a long time now:

http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=218535

I don’t actually want a tag as such, more like a notepad/sticky note sort of thing where I can jot down whatever I want, including links to other objects (like a todo list, calendar item, web page, file on disk, etc).

You could parse and index the added metadata and produce tags from that, I suppose. That would be very handy for searching.

By: Aharon Varady

Aharon Varady — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:27:45 +0000

I’ve been tagging my events according to task, project, meta-project goals, and visions in Calendar. If I could connect my discussions archived in Thunderbird with these events (and also archive my personal documents in a similar schema), then I feel like I’d have my mental map pretty well layed out. Great idea. Thinking of implementation — imagine if a drop down list of events was available in Thunderbird and derived from the events listed in Lightning/Sunbird Calendar.