[MlMt] Flags/tags/colours.

[Benny Kjær Nielsen]

On 16 Apr 2014, at 2:05, Scott A. McIntyre wrote:

> Apple Mail lets you flag different messages with different colours.  
> There seems to be SOME support for that in MailMate, in that 
> previously flagged messages from Mail.app show up with a different 
> coloured flag in MailMate (I've seen at least Red and Yellow flags).

That is correct. You might not care, but here is the technical 
explanation for the records:

Apple Mail uses 3 IMAP keywords to specify color (in addition to the 
standard `\Flagged`):

	$MailFlagBit0
	$MailFlagBit1
	$MailFlagBit2

As indicated by the names, these are interpreted as bits and therefore 8 
different combinations (colors) are possible. Only 7 are used by Apple 
Mail though (IIRC).

As you have noticed, MailMate uses these IMAP keywords to change the 
color of the flag.

> However, how can I make better/greater use of that?  Or can I for now?

Yes, the standard key bindings include this:

	"F" = {
		"0" = ( "removeTag:", "\\Flagged", "removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit0", 
"removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit1", "removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit2" );
		"1" = (    "setTag:", "\\Flagged", "removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit0", 
"removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit1", "removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit2" );
		"2" = (    "setTag:", "\\Flagged",    "setTag:", "$MailFlagBit0", 
"removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit1", "removeTag:", "$MailFlagBit2" );
		...
	};

This means that if you hit ⇧F and then follow it by a number (1-7) 
then you can set the color of the flag (0 removes the flag). This is all 
you need to know. The rest is just because I like to tell how it works 
;-)

> I saw that Benny mentioned there was work going on with the tag 
> feature, and I'm happy to wait - but I did like the ability to simply 
> flag something with a certain colour to represent a prioritisation 
> interest for my attention.

The “work” done is currently only a list of things to do to improve 
tagging in general. Some day.

Off topic: The bit-technique used by Apple is interesting because some 
(many?) servers have a limitation on the number of tags (IMAP keywords) 
available. I don't really have complaints from users about this yet, but 
the bit-technique could be a workaround to allow a very large number of 
tags with a very small number of IMAP keywords (for example, 16 IMAP 
keywords could be used to provide 65536 tags). This would of course 
require a mapping from tag names to bits, but a mapping is already 
necessary if using non-ASCII tag names.

-- 
Benny
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