Yet another release of Tag the Bird is available. Version 1.2 fixes the long known problems on Unix systems.

Get it here.

Since Thunderbird 2.0 got released, more and more people kept asking me for an update of Tag the Bird, because TB's built in tagging obviously sucks.
So the new version of Tag the Bird got approved by Mozilla yesterday.

• Tag the Bird is now compatible with Thunderbird 2.0
• Added French locales
• Added support for IMAP accounts - finally! :)

Get it here.

And while waiting for approval of 1.1, I almost finished work on 1.2, which will be fixing the current UNIX related problems! Stay tuned.

Guess what! TTB1.0 finally got approved by the Mozilla staff and is available right here: Tag the Bird 1.0 - Tagging in Thunderbird.
Don't forget to uninstall RC1 manually, if you got that installed.

Enrico Stahn joined the TTB Team and will implement two features he proposed:

• tagging of multiple messages
• filter based autotagging

Olivier Marcé was so kind to send me a French translation for TTB. It will be part of v1.1. Thank you!

Talking about v1.1: I hope very much that this version will be the first to feature IMAP support. I think I will be able to release it until the end of July. Stay tuned!

Tag the Bird enhances Mozilla Thunderbird with the crucial feature of tagging and tag based searching.

I hereby give rc1 for Tag the Bird 1.0 to the world!

Wow, it shines!
Changelog:

• Tags are now stored in the X-Tags header of a message. This gives us truely searchable Tags!
• The "Add Tag" dialog has been dropped and been replaced by a completely new "Edit Tags" dialog.
• Dimensions have been dropped.
• A couple of new Options.
• Lots of bugfixes.
• More lots of little tweaks and enhancements regarding speed, stability and compatibility.

Download: Tag the Bird v1.0 rc1

Alternative download available in the SVN repository.

I recommend you uninstall your prior versions of Tag the Bird, restart your Thunderbird, and install v1.0 rc1 after that. It should not make any difference though.

Important notes:

• Though this release has been carefully tested, it's a release candidate after all! I highly recommend you test it on some testaccount before using it with your normal emails.
• Vis-à-vis Thunderbird rc1 already identifies itself as v1.0. Therefore Tag the Bird won't be updated once another release candidate or the final v1.0 is available (because it thinks you already got that version). If you install rc1 make sure to check this blog and/or addons.mozilla.org often for updates. If such are available, you have to manually uninstall rc1 and restart Thunderbird, before installing any other v1.0.

Known bugs:

• Sometimes searches will return more results than you expected. The reason for this is, that when you command Thunderbird to search the 'X-Tags' header (or any other header) for a specific value, it will always search for that value in all headers. Therefore, for example, if you are searching for a tag called 'knallgrau', the search will return all messages tagged with 'knalkgrau' plus all messages that came from or went to somebody from that company, because the 'From' or the 'To' header (or even the 'Orgainzation' header) contain that string. This is a bug in Thunderbird, not Tag the Bird. I hope they fix it soon.
• Sometimes searches will return no result altough they should. I could not find the reason for this yet, but I only encountered this behaviour right after Thunderbird started. My suspicion is, that the search engine somehow needs time to 'initialize'. Just do the same search again and it will return the right results. Help on this one is appreciated.
• This is not really a bug: Tag the Bird uses a XPCOM method that has a comment about Mac OS here. I'd really appreciate if somebody could test Tag the Bird on one of the mentioned OSes.

If you find any other bugs, please help to make this a great extension and and report them here.

If you want to contribute by translating Tag the Bird from either English or German into your language please contact me.

Next steps after v1.0:

• IMAP support
• some minor enhancements in the UI

Today Tag the Bird 0.9.1 finally got approved by Mozilla. You can now get it at addons.mozilla.org.

If you are already using Tag the Bird, please uninstall the extension and reinstall it with the file provided on addons.mozilla.org. Though this *should* not be nescessary, it makes sure that autoupdating your Thunderbird extensions now covers Tag the Bird too. You will always get the newest Tag the Bird version automatically.

Plus: Things look great as far as developing on v1.0 (truely searchable tags) goes. Stay tuned.

Here's a new Release of Tag the Bird:

Changelog:

• Now compatibel with current Thunderbird version 1.5.0.2 (and all upcoming versions until - and not including - 1.5.1).
• Message options are now in a separate cascaded menu.
• Message options can be accessed via a message's contextmenu too (right click).
• Message options can now be used in message windows (= windows only displaying a single message) and not in the main messenger window only.

Download: Tag the Bird v0.9.1
Edit: Please do not use this version anymore. See here.

I recommend you uninstall your 0.9.0 version of Tag the Bird, restart your Thunderbird, and install version 0.9.1 after that. It should not make any difference though.

Please note, that the same remarks as here still apply.

Because you're reading this, I guess you might be interested in the fact, that I'm currently in contact with some guys [1, 2] who have a couple of nice ideas about tags in Thunderbird and are willing to contribute. So stay tuned for great things to come!

Plus: I'm still trying to get TTB into the official extension list at addons.mozilla.org. At least I now found out what the problem is: Their upload form believes I want to submit an extension for the Mozilla Suite where TTB obviously will not work and the review fails. Guess I'll drop them a line.

Smi already mentioned that there's a tagthe.net extension for Mozilla Thunderbird under way. Well, actually it's been long ready, but not released, because the least you could say about those guys over at addons.mozilla.org is, that they are somewhat unorganized. (How else would you explain, that currently Thunderbird-extensions get their approval, that have been submitted way after Tag the Bird?) For this reasion we decided to make Tag the Bird available here, until approved by the Mozilla staff. Behold:



Download: Tag the Bird v0.9.0
Edit: Don't use this version anymore! There's a new one released.

Of course this is not at all a final version, and loads of features are still to come, but there's already a bunch of functionality available:

• autotagging of your emails
• splitting your tags by tagthe.net dimensions (topic, person, location)
• adding custom tags
• freely customizable external search engines
• English and German localization
• ...

Requirements

• Mozilla Thunderbird 1.5

Installation:
Download the file. In Thunderbird go to Tools > Extensions > Install. Select the downloaded file and restart Thunderbird.

Important Notes:

• For this is only a temporary place to host the extension until it's approved by Mozilla, there's no auto-updating mechanism available. Please make sure to always uninstall any previous version of Tag the Bird before installing a new one, to avoid unwanted behaviour as long as the extension is hosted here.
• For tagging the textual content of your Emails is transmitted to tagthe.net's Rest-API via a secure connection. Please make sure you understood our privacy policy.

Bug-reports always welcome.