I complained last year about the lack of mail annotation, sighed deeply and got on with things. This morning I found out about two little Mail.app plugins, Mail Tags and Mail Act-On, and I am smiling. Mail Tags adds the ability to assign metadata to a mail entry (also Spotlight searhable, might I add) and Mail Act-On makes it so you can mark up a mail message with hot keys. They both work within the Rules paradigm of rules, so I can, for example, take messages about Dan’s Chocolates as they come into the inbox, flag them, set a due date of today + 2, and then create a smart mailbox to catch overdue messages. If they need some special explanation, I can add it in as a comment.

This doesn’t replace my Tinderbox Project Organizer by any stretch of the imagination, but if used well it could be a strong supporting player. Since every element in my project tracker has an ID, being able to tag relevant mails with that ID would be a real time saver if I need to go back and reconstruct a “what was I thinking?” moment.

In summary, yay.