One of the big features of Thunderbird 2 was that you could now tag your messages. I was excited, until I tried to use it.
Unfortunately, they’re tags in name only.
In fact, they look and function no differently than the old labels. The only difference it seemed, was that you could create as many as you wanted, and you weren’t limited to 10 of them.
So why aren’t Thunderbird 2′s tags actually tags?
For me, the reason is that they are expensive to create:
Tags are nice because they’re lightweight, and inexpensive. They’re cheap. When you use del.icio.us, you don’t have to go through a dialog to add a new tag, you just type it. You’re not prompted if you type a tag that you already used. Indeed, that is the benefit of tags; they’re organic and they align with how your brain works.
Adding tags through a dialog just doesn’t work: it’s slow and expensive.