I have been thinking about how i would improve Mozilla Thunderbird and calendar since before the GooToDo demonstration at BarcampNYC, but that really got my ideas swirling. Just yesterday, Hope and I were talking about email and productivity and the 800 messages in her inbox. So I started thinking a bit more about what I want from my email client and calendar tool. Email:

• I want to be able to tag (think del.icio.us, flickr, web2.0) my incoming email. I don't want to have to move it into folders, and then remember where i put it it. I just want to tag it with the relevant keywords, and then be able to easily filter and search based on tags.
• I'd also like to be able to tag my outgoing email so that I could search through it too, and maybe my friends and colleagues also using the tagging feature would be able to use my tags and add their own.
• I would like to be able to set a “due dateâ€? for incoming emails, this could be just a way to reorder incoming emails to push off things i don't need to deal with today, but make sure that they don't just get burrieed under the constant stream of messages, rather resurface in 3 days when i need to deal with it by. Or, it could involve turning the email into a “to doâ€? item in my calendar (see below).

Calendaring and Email:

• Most of my calendar events, and even many of my todos start out as email. I would love to be able to press a button a turn an email into a calendar item, or a todo item. Then i would be able to add information or other details to the item. Preferable the item would link back to the email easily, but copying the info from the email into the notes field would be great too.

I started out my saying that I'd been thinking about enhancing Mozilla Thunderbird and Calendar. It seems to make sense. I would imagine that this functionality could be implemented through extensions for these applications. I emailed Chris Messina over at Flock to see if he knew anyone who might be interested in working on this stuff. He suggested I blog it, and send it to the flock developers and talk to Mitch Kapor from Chandler to see if they might be thinking about this functionality already. So that's what I've done.