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.

We are experiencing some problems with the server right now that cause tagthe.net to not work reliable. :(

Please be patient while we are fixing the problems.

-- ben

Update:

It seems that a recent server upgrade introduced a known bug in the Java Hotspot Compiler.

There is a workaround for the bug so I hope everything is fine again.

There will be some unusual server load for the next hours because I will run some tests. But this should not affect your programs.

One problem with public web services is that if you depend of them in your software, you are pretty much screwed if the service is cancelled for some reason. The solution is to have alternative services by hand you can switch to.

For example, when the tag extraction service tagyu shut down, codewarrior, the popular tagging plugin for wordpress went down too.

Fortunately, it is relative easy to change the plugin so it uses tagthe.net instead of tagyu. We did this in January, and Jay has some instructions on how to change the service in more recent versions.

As for tagthe.net, it has become a very successful service for knallgrau and we are using it within several of our own applications, like blogr.com or wahlblogs.at. So our plans are definitely to keep the service running and continually improve it.

However, this does not mean that the world couldn't use more text extraction services. Choice is always a good thing, and this is especially true with web services.

And if you happen to have a plan for a service that is similar to tagthe.net, please consider a interface similar to ours, or contact us so we can talk about a common interface that fits both our needs. There is nothing worse for an application developer than to write two different interface codes for two services that actually do the same thing.

Economy Chat is a django web application developed by Zilbo that aggregates many different blogs on economy. It contacts tagthe.net in order to tag the aggregated content. Besides it's got integrated support for such fancy stuff as user ratings and nicely integrates with services like del.icio.us and reddit. Check it out to get some inspiration for what you might want to use tagthe.net for.

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

Inspired by Pratik Naik's Ruby Wrapper, I decided to write an improved Ruby API for Tagthe.net. This is more or less a complete rewrite of Pratik's code, which has some improvements such as dynamic dimension detection or command line usage (see the comments in the script for more).

Tagthe.net Ruby API