This post assumes that you know about Flags and used them already (if not look in the menu “Message/Flag/…”.
Rename Flags
Surprisingly (at least for me) you can edit those “flag names” just by clicking on text twice (like in Finder):

And save the new name by hitting return.

Add a keyboard shortcut
The next interesting step is to attach a keyboard shortcut to this flag. Open “System Preferences” and go to “Keyboard”. There select the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab and under “Application Shortcuts you add a new entry (by clicking on the “+” symbol).
Edit the entry. Make sure you use the same name you gave the flag. Here it’s probably getting interesting if you chose a name that already exists somewhere else in the Mail.app menu… (did not try that).

Result: The renamed Flag along with the new shortcut.

Finally the tagging / labeling feature I used so much in Mozilla Thunderbird is available in Mail.app as well
Tags: 10.7, Color, Flag, Keyboard, Label, Lion, Mac, Mail, Mail.app, OS X, Shortcut, Tag, Thunderbird


21. December 2011 at 1:09 |
Thanks for your site. It helped me find a bug. I had flagged several messages with “red” I then wanted to change the name, but I had hidden “Reminders” so MacOS help was useless saying only “double click a flag and rename it; except there were none visible!
After reading your site, I see that they’re under Reminders (why?) and I unhid them. Still, there was no disclosure triangle.
Here’s a bug then: re-flag one of the messages to “orange” and the disclosure triangle appears. Make it red again, and the triangle remains (making this difficult to reproduce!)
Regardless, works fine now.
So…flags are a great improvement, but *tags* would be much better. You can only assign one flag at a time and tags, combined with smart mail boxes would be just perfect. For that we still need a third party plug-in: mail tags.
13. July 2012 at 2:01 |
Tags are where the add-on MailTags comes in (obdev.ca).
13. July 2012 at 9:45 |
Thank you. MailTags looks very interesting – if there would not be the somewhat high price tag…
Btw: I think you might have mixed up something in the URL
http://www.obdev.at/ is the site of Objective Development – the developers of Little Snitch and LaunchBar, other extremely useful tools.
http://www.indev.ca/ is where you can find MailTags
21. April 2013 at 23:45 |
[...] Article Describing Configuring short cuts: Making OS X Lion Mail.app Flags more useful [...]