Tags (Labels)

[cvanp11]

Gmail revolutionized webmail with their label feature, why not bring this to open source hosted-webmail?

Any Gmail power user knows what I mean. Gmail gives you the ability to "label" emails with labels that you define. You can give an email (as far as I can tell) an unlimited number of labels. Then, rather than organizing with folders, you sort with labels. Because you can use multiple labels your system is more accurate. It's hard to put an email into multiple folders!

Gmail also has the ability to automatically give an email a label based on a number of conditions you set such as "from address", "subject", etc. It's quite awesome when you can automatically have any email with "Fwd" or "Forward" in the subject automatically labeled as "Forwards" and taken out of my inbox.

If you don't quite know what I mean get a Gmail account and you'll find out. Labels revolutionized webmail so it'd be awesome if those of us who host email ourselves could have this great feature.

Chris

[bpat1434]

I wouldn't say revolutionized. I'd say it gave new light on an old system. Labels took the "folders" out of organizing mail.

[qutoe]Gmail also has the ability to automatically give an email a label based on a number of conditions you set such as "from address", "subject", etc. It's quite awesome when you can automatically have any email with "Fwd" or "Forward" in the subject automatically labeled as "Forwards" and taken out of my inbox.[/quote]
This is nothing more than having a filter that says if subject matches "Fwd" or "Forward" with anything after that, then move it to "Forwarded" folder. It's the same idea, just instead of folders, it uses labels.

The thing that makes gMail so much better is the fact that everything is stored in the INBOX and nothing in folders. It's how gMail reads the flags is what makes it unique. If the flag "read" isn't set, then it sits in the inbox; unless other flags put it elsewhere. Starring of important messages instead of flagging them is a nifty idea.

Unfortunately, this really can't be brought over, yet. Many Desktop clients (Thunderbird, Outlook, Eudora) still deal with the IMAP standard. So if RC gave a message flags, and any other client logged on, your inbox would be huge, thousands of messages with flags that the client has no idea what to do with. Don't believe me? Connect to your gmail account with Thunderbird or Outlook. You get all the messages in the INBOX folder, not just the unread messages.

It's a great idea, but it's not something that's plausible right now since labels aren't supported in 100% of the clients, and most would use RC as something of a secondary mail system in case they're away from their personal computer. This would be good for a plug-in though. Something that could be available if the user wanted it, but only with the plug-in.