Last week, I wrote about my romance with MailTags 3. Since then, I’ve been slowly convincing my workmates to download the free trial. It was through this that I found the coolest thing about MailTags.
Because you can set specific MailTags for a sent message, you can see all of the tags come back to you when the person replies. So if I send the email to Joe who doesn’t have MailTags and he responds, his response has my MailTags already set. But here’s what’s even cooler: If you send the message to someone who does have MailTags 3 installed, they see all of the same tags!
As I mentioned last week, MailTags 3 has a much improved interface over MailTags 2 and I didn’t realize how nice it was until I used it straight for over a week. What I also found incredibly helpful was that I can tag multiple email messages. This made tagging groups of email super easy.
For example, I receive emails with receipts attached that I want to go through and add to an Excel spreadsheet, but I want to save them up and do them all at once at the end of the week. So, as they start to pile up, I select a bunch at once using Command-click and then just click Tag Messages. I can set a “tickle date” for Friday, and using Smart Mailboxes, I can create a wealth of search criteria based on the tags.
In Lion Mail, there is a Favorites bar, which I didn’t realize. Just drag your most often-used Smart Mailbox for easy access to it!
And lastly, if you are a fan of creating rules in Mail, MailTags is fully integrated into Mail’s rule engine. I created a rule “Radio tag” where IF the sender is a member of my AddressBook group “Radio,” then I can set my keyword to radio. This way, all of my mail is marked with one tag without my having to do anything. I believe that this is how MS Entourage (and now MS Outlook) deals with marking messages with Projects or Groups. This was one aspect of Entourage that I really missed when I moved to Mail.
There are other features that I probably won’t use, however, such as integration with OmniFocus* or Things, but for what I need, MailTags does fabulously.
As a reminder, MailTags 3 is on sale through the end of April for an introductory price of $19.95. They also have a demo so that you can try the product for 10 days (which was enough to get me hooked).
*Editor’s Note: We’ll have a review of OmniFocus in an upcoming issue; it’s an incredibly powerful application, and now has an added bonus of compatibility with MailTags! -KH