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About Tags
Tags are a critical component in how Ensemble organizes and synchronizes contacts. It also offers very powerful opportunities for filters and actions in Thunderbird.
This is where I'll record my thoughts on that.
Tags help you to organize your contacts into many categories -- family, friends, work, clients, PTA group, baseball team, etc.
Tags are more flexible than folders, because a contact can have more than one tag applied to it.
Hopefully! That'd be a really excellent and powerful application of tags. Imagine a message filter in Thunderbird that ensures that any messages from contacts tagged with "family" are starred. Or, imagine a filter that ensures that any messages from contacts tagged with "Crazy Ex's" are immediately sent to the trash.
This will involve some integration on Thunderbird's side, but I'd really like this to happen.
Every contact provider gets a tag defined for it. So, if you have added the System Address Book as a contact provider, there'd be a System Address Book tag. If you have added a Google contacts provider, there'd be a corresponding tag, like "Google - [email protected]".
For these special contact provider tags, when a contact is assigned that tag, this means "write the contact to this contact provider". When the tag is removed, it means "delete the contact from this contact provider".
There will also likely be system-managed tags. The only one I've come up with right now is "Conflicted" - if a synchronization conflict has occurred, Ensemble will do its best effort to resolve the conflict itself, but will also log what has happened, and tag the contact as "Conflicted". The user can then browse all of their "Conflicted" contacts, and resolve them manually at their leisure.
They're equivalent. Users should be able to send mail to all contacts with a particular tag. The user should be able to specify rules for each tag - for example, "write with BCC".
When importing contacts from the old address book, the old mailing lists and sub-address books structure will be converted into our notion of "tags". So, each individual address book will have a tag each. Each mailing list will also have a tag each.
Google Contacts has a notion of groups. The System Address Book often has a notion of groups as well.
So how is that related to tags?
Tags in Ensemble should have the ability to be written to a user's contact providers. The user should be able to choose which contact providers that the tag will be written to.
This is conditional upon the contact providers having some notion of collections or tags. We must trust the connectors to say whether or not this is the case.
It should be made explicit to the user that if a tag X has been saved to a contact provider Y, then contacts tagged with X will also be tagged as belonging to Y.