I have to use Outlook (web version) for my work, and I've recently got pretty good at managing my inbox by tagging my emails and shooting them straight to the Archive folder instead of trying to figure out precisely where they should live. It's so much easier for my brain to handle, but I really think it only works for me because Outlook makes it so easy with default keyboard shortcuts. Highlight an email, press "c," start typing the tag name, Outlook filters all my tags down as I type, I hit enter on the right one, "esc" to close the tag list, then "e" to Archive it. I never have to touch the mouse and I can just fly through all my bullshit while knowing I could easily find it later if need be. It's awesome.
I want to start doing this for my personal email. I'm using Thunderbird right now. It does have a tagging feature but it's soooo primitive and frustrating compared to Outlook. The only way to tag an email with a keyboard shortcut is to know the Number of the tag. That'd be no biggie except... there's no ability to manually re-order the tags, so once you build your muscle memory, if you have to add a tag later, you get to re-learn the order, because Thunderbird always puts the most recently added tag at the top of the list. Gross.
I searched around the net for a while today and found a lot of people with the same complaints about Thunderbird. I saw a guide some enterprising soul wrote on how to hack the Thunderbird Config Editor to organize and sort tags in your preferred order, but it looks fuckin brutally painstaking and while I have the ability to do this, I have not the patience. Link for the curious: https://superuser.com/questions/1543390/how-do-i-reorder-tags-in-thunderbird
If there's some trick or extension that makes Thunderbird behave like I want, I stopped mining and turned around before I found it...
I turn now to the lovelies here at the bearsite for help. Are there any FOSS email clients out there with a tagging system like Outlook's (i.e. based on text matching)? I wanna rock with keyboard shortcuts, I don't wanna be a mouse toucher. I could settle for a system like Thunderbird's where the keyboard shortcut relates to the number of the tag in the list, but only if it lets me manually order them without having to play Hackerman.
Much love,
decaptcha
When people see me code or write emails or browse my filesystem or do basically anything that isnt in a web browser, this is their reaction lol.
I mean, its a big investment. The tutorial is super helpful, but its definitely an investment into learning an ecosystem. Word of advice: dont go for fancy things like spacemacs or doom or cua keys or any of that. Start with plain old emacs. Craft a config based on what you use. I can recommend packages, but the big frameworks IMO make emacs more opaque and its important to be able to understand the packages youre using/installing.
Tbh, I dont use it. I find mu is good enough at filtering all my emails (only about 4k emails tho, not very many) that I dont need the tags. But, I can link the manual and the tagging repo and you can look at what might go into setting them up
This won't be how it works. From reading the tagging source code and docstrings, it has a list of tags (which can either be flags, or mutually exclusive categorical tags) which are added/removed from a piece of mail. Tags have an associated keybinding to add/remove them, and I would be amazed if it doesnt provide an auto complete list (look up "emacs vertico orderless marginalia" in YouTube or something for an idea of how emacs prompts the user). The big limitation of this library is that it doesnt sync the tags with the IMAP server, theyre only stored locally. You could probably do something with the mail headers and sync back to the IMAP server, but I'm not really sure. IMAP is an RPC protocol tho I think?
I will say, plain old mu4e has labels and headers and actions, which might be enough for what you want to do!
I'll give some links later on in my day ^^