I have written before about replacement options for tagging email and now find myself at a further crossroads with the imminent release of Sonoma and the withdrawal of mail plugins. I either have to use a new email client (like Postbox but cant sync between multiple Macs), switch to Gmail to use their labelling, or wait for Mailsuites new email client (suspect this will be feature limited).
I have many hundreds of tags as I give every project an individual numbered tag and this enables me to search accurately for all correspondence on this project.
Anyone care to share their thoughts if they find themselves in a similar boat?
I’m in the same boat and would welcome a solution. I’ve used MailSuite extensively for years, and feel that upgrading to Sonoma isn’t an easy decision because of losing that data. Apple announced years ago that Mail plugins would not be supported, and notified developers years ago that macOS 14 is when that will happen. I wrote SmallCubed a couple weeks ago to ask (again) when MailMaven would be released, and the answer was “we’re a small group and we have no idea when MailMaven would be released”.
I’ll take the Goliath path. I think my action will be to export all messages from currently active projects to DEVONthink, grouped by project, and then retag the messages there. I will just abandon the projects and tags I no longer use and go ahead and upgrade to Sonoma in a few weeks. For the future I’ll use smart groups in Sonoma Mail for new projects.
My thinking is pretty similar, revert back to a folder structure within Mail. Not yet sure how practical this will be but probably the best option for now…
I would recommend using Devonthink. Import your emails. It may retain the tags, but I’m not sure. You then have a full database app to search, tag, group and link to your emails. I have some 90K emails in a database and it works great.
Apple did not provide a more powerful replacement for mail plugins. Mail extensions use a very limited API and the tech has not been improved by Apple since they offered it. You can see how limited the technology is by the lack of implementation of mail extensions. Apple dropped the ball on both the deprecation of plugins and the lack of interest in making extensions a powerful option for third-party developers.