Keyword tags and email

In Q2, 2007 I changed companies, which also meant a change to Outlook email. The immediate frustration of Outlook was the inability to put an email message in more that one folder. (You can copy a message to multiple folders, but this duplicates messages). On top of that the Outlook 2003 search is anemic. Upgrading to outlook 2007 helped searching, but the problem of how to file email remained.

Then I discovered an Outlook add-in product called Taglocity which allows you to add keyword tags to messages. After using keyword tags for several months I realized that this approach actually woks better that filing messages in multiple folders. The reason is that you can search on multiple keyword tags. Its a bit like searching for a message that exists in multiple folders. Although that is something I never did with folders, I do it all the time with keyword tags and find it very useful. The only problem with Taglocity is that it is an add on to Outlook, which means that if I use the web interface, I don't have access to my keyword searching.

The interesting thing about using Outlook now for over two and a half years is that it is no better or worse that Notes email; just different. And that although the Exchange back end has been reliable, there are just as many calendar issues with Outlook as there were with Notes. It seems like the calendar is just a very difficult problem to solve.