370076 - Create/apply tags for messages by typing with the keyboard / Port Firefox tagging UI to Thunderbird (implement new way of tagging, method, system, applying tags too complicated)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Gantry Zettler]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.1) Gecko/20061204 Firefox/2.0.0.1
Build Identifier: version 2 beta 2 (20070116)

Create a way to tag an email message using the keyboard and typing in all tags.  Similiar to delicious, et al.  Use commas to separate tags in case one is using a tag with spaces in it, or perhaps quoting tags with spaces and using whitespace as the delimiter.  

If the tag is not already part of the user's tag list, either 1) create the tag automatically with the default color or 2) warn the user with a dialog box and force them to create the tag though the normal mechanisms.

With users who heavily tag and only 9 tag shortcut keys, it would often be easier/faster to hit a key (maybe Ctrl-T or t) and start typing in all the tags for the email - ex "orders, books, amazon, gifts" - than going through a right-click menu once per tag.  If auto-creation of tags is also easily implementable via the keyboard entry, it would often be a quicker way to create tags.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Try to create tags for an email by typing the tag name
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Confirming RFE.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I believe that it was for a reason that this RFE was immediately confirmed by Magnus Melin as soon as it was posted (2 years ago): Basically, it calls for porting the advanced tagging system of Firefox to Thunderbird. This in turn would be a HUGE(!) usability improvement compared to the poor (read: highly inefficient und non-versatile) tagging system TB has right now. It's great to have GLODA to improve our SEARCH experience; implementing this RFE would go a LONG way in actually enabling people to FIND things according to their own criteria. Just imagine the comfort of tagging your messages on the fly, creating new tags as you type, plus the added comfort of tagging autocomplete which I believe is already underway for Firefox. We could actually USE tags to sort and search our messages. Unfortunately Omar's request "wanted TB3?" hasn't been answered for more than a year... Developers, even if you don't / can't do this for TB3, please consider making this a high priority as soon as possible.

Summary of this bug might be improved like this:
Port Firefox tagging system to Thunderbird - create tags for messages by typing with the keyboard (implement new way of tagging, method, applying tags too complicated)

Comment 3

[Justin Long]

This is the primary reason I do not use Thunderbird any more and haven't for a long time. Gmail's labeling system does this very easily, and it has gotten more easy within the last few months with their new implementation of labels. Ah, well!

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

iirc postbox does something in this area very nicely

Comment 5

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

IMHO this bug deserves more attention.

This bug should be marked "wanted-TB3+" to show this is needed/desirable even if perhaps developers currently don't have the resources to implement this ("Wanted-TB3?" has been there since 2008-03-13). If still applicable, importance property (P1, P2...) of this bug should be set, too.

Efficient user-defined tagging is an increasingly important way of sorting and retrieving information. However, Thunderbird's TB2/TB3beta current tagging UI is obsolete (and partly buggy) compared to modern tagging UIs like the one in Firefox (now including Tag Autocomplete). Creation and application of tags requires too many and too complex steps, because the old tagging UI has not been designed with scalability in mind and is therefore rather unsuitable for handling a lot of user-defined tags efficiently. Current tags administration UI also has problems because it was designed for small numbers of tags (bug 368084). As Bug 368084 comment #17 has it, old tags UI paradigm (based on having small number of tags) needs to be replaced by "a new implementation which should start from the ground up"... (see also: Meta Bug 432710 - Thunderbird Tag Bugs Tracker)

Improved the summary of this bug to indicate that Firefox tags UI is a good model and porting some of the code to TB might make this considerably easier to implement. Comment #2 has some words on the benefits of the FF tags UI.

Comment 6

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

The following related bugs also call for easier ways of creating/applying tags:
Bug 363473 - Implement (dockable) tags pane with list of tags
Bug 381961 - Create a Tag Cloud for E-mail

Comment 7

[Daniel Kabs, reporting bugs since 2002]

Undoubtedly this would be very nice to have, but I guess this needs to be thoroughly thought through.

While I'm at it, I'd like to campaign for my RFE regarding tags, see Bug #528034. :-) It will cover our backs until "tags clouds" and "tag while you type" are implemented in TB.

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Related Bug 520560 - A label system like Gmail -with new features

Comment 10

[Nicola Ottomano]

There is an extension that is no longer updared. 
It is called "Tag the bird": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/thunderbird/addon/tag-the-bird

Maybe someone can update it.

Comment 11

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Another high-value "papercut" bug with obvious enterprise-relevance.
We might take a clue from the UI of the Firefox tags implementation, but internally we need something different and it won't be trivial.

Message tags in Thunderbird leave a lot to desire, see bug 432710 (tb-tagsmeta).
Apart from the various bugs, this has also been recently requested and discussed on the TB-UX mail list: Tags management for a message.