On 10 Jan 2014, at 16:55, Kee Hinckley wrote:

One of the things I miss from Mail is the ability to "label" messages with a color, so I can easily browse my mail for different kinds of messages that I've tagged with filters.

Likewise, and I think from previous conversations, Benny has some plans for ways for theming or skinning the app, to give more possibilities. And I'm sure colour would be right in there.

I was thinking about that, and I thought about the fact that in that sentence I just used the words "label", "color" and "tagged". Those are really different concepts (well, perhaps labels and tags are the same), but they all combine to mean "make it easy to identify types of messages.

When I started this message, I was thinking of requesting the addition of the ability to color messages, but now I'm thinking that perhaps what I'd rather have is the ability to associate visual attributes with MailMate's existing tags. If I could specify that a tag has a color and/or icon associated with it, we could use the existing capabilities to visually identify items. "Flagged" messages already implicitly do this. But I like the idea of being able to have arbitrary icons and colors.

I've tried most email clients out there, and the best visual look for me is either Sparrow or Airmail. Both have colours associated with tags (which can be set by the user), and various different ways of showing them. I personally like having a small triangular coloured 'notch' in the top right of the message list item (which can be multiline). Or you can list the coloured tag(s) at the start of the message subject, like Gmail.

Less clear is what to do when there is more than one tag. You could always prioritize them by the order of tags in the attributes panel. But it might be nice to combine them in some way. Colors could literally be combined, but I don't know if that would really work. Icons could show one in the column, and more in the header?

Where there are multiple tags and the design only allows one to be shown, then I suspect the least frequently-used one should be shown.

Regards,

-- Jonathan
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