The macosxhints Rating:

[Score: 8 out of 10]

• Developer: Scott Morrisson / Product page
• Price: $20.00 (uncrippled donationware)

From the creator of previous Pick of the Week Mail Act-On comes this amazingly cool tagging plug-in for Mail. MailTags lets you, well, tag your mail in a number of ways--you can assign due dates, create iCal to do items, add multiple keywords, and even add comments. MailTags also integrates with Spotlight, making it easy to then work with all your coded messages.

Instead of trying to cover everything that MailTags can do, I'll just point you to Dan Frakes' recent Mac Gems entry on the program; Dan does a good job of explaining how it works and some ways it can be used.

There's one big limitation with MailTags, however -- it won't work well with messages stored on an IMAP server. While it will let you tag such messages, the tagging is local, and if you ever rebuild that IMAP box, all tag data is lost. However, I'm so impressed with the feature set in MailTags that I'm now changing my workflow. I'll be moving most of my "hot" messages to a local folder, and then move a copy of any "must handle ASAP!" messages to the IMAP folder if I know I'll be going on the road. But if you rely on IMAP and keep your mail in IMAP-stored folders, MailTags probably isn't for you.

I've only just started using MailTags, but it's already helped me keep track of the multitude of stuff that flows through the inboxes each day.