Gmail use the term "Labels" while del.icio.us, YouTube and other web 2.0 websites prefer to say "tags" but the basic idea is same - tags (or labels or categories) make it easy for you to filter or search content. Like Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook uses the concept of folders to organize email messages - the problem with the folder approach is that an email message, task or contact can be stored only in one folder at a time unlike Gmail where you can place an email into any number of virtual folders (aka Labels).
Also read: Is Your GMail Inbox Full ?
If you are missing tags in Outlook, get Taglocity. It's a Microsoft Outlook add-in that adds tagging feature to your Outlook interface. You can assign multiple tags to your emails messages and quickly filter content in folders based on tag names.
Similar to del.icio.us, you can create a tag cloud of your email messages where the varying font sizes help you visualize the number of messages under that tag.
Taglocity is available for Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 on Windows XP and Windows Vista. There is a free version of Taglocity for Personal Use though it imposes a limit on the number of tags.
www.taglocity.com | Download Taglocity | Screencast Demo [via Channel9]
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2007/07/add-tags-to-your-outlook-email-messages.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
I wonder whether this system has any advantages over using a regular folder system supported by a desktop search program such as Google desktop. And any way this could sync with delicious?
Written on 27/7/07 5:57 PM
The tags are useful because, unlike folders, you can have many of them on one things, i.e describe different aspects of it (very useful when trying to find/filter things later).
Also, the tags can 'travel' on the email messages which is handy as a kind of 'conversation' grouper. I'd send you and five other people an email with 'DigitalInspiration' on it and all the replies would come back to me pre-tagged correctly.
You can sync/import your delicious tags, although I tend to have a different set for my emails now so just did this at the beginning.
Written on 28/7/07 2:32 AM