I’ve just uploaded a new version of TaQuilla to Mozilla’s add-on site. You can download it here. It is still listed as experimental status, so updates are not automatic. Details of the changes in this revision are available here, but briefly it mostly adds some user interface consolidations for consistency, plus support for Thunderbird 3.0 and SeaMonkey 2.0.
Frankly, I’ve struggled to find a good personal use of TaQuilla for use in my dogfooding. I’ve tried using it to categorize “interesting” posts, but I can’t even agree myself from day-to-day what is “interesting”, and the soft tagging is even more indecisive. But I’ve finally hit on a good use for it in my workflow – rejecting of sports articles in newsfeeds!
I have an RSS feed that subscribes to local news for the “Seattle Times” newspaper, but I find a lot of the articles are sports related. Now I am a certified geek, and not really interested in those types of articles. So what I did is to create a tag “Sports”, then I setup TaQuilla soft tags for “Sports” on the RSS feed, create a virtual folder that filters out articles tagged with “Sports”, and voila I can read the newspaper feed without all of those annoying sports articles. It’s particularly useful since many of the same articles get updated multiple times, and the updates are very efficiently rejected with the bayes filter if I tag the original.
Thanks a lot, will try it out.
I have been looking forward to it, as separating important e-mails from e-mails that are not important is the usually phase 1 of my Inbox processing, and I think that for a fair portion the decision can be made by a classifier.
I’m curious why we don’t have the option of labelling our tags? If you are tagging “Sports”, I am not sure where you can set this up using TaQuilla. Maybe I am misunderstanding how that is done.
TaQuilla’s tags are the same as the email tags that are part of the core Thunderbird application. So they are setup in Tools/Options/Display/Tags, but must be enabled for bayes analysis in Tools/Addons/TaQuilla/Options before they will be analyzed.
Thanks, I figured it out last night.
Does removing tags make the Bayesian filter make it learn (make it smarter)? I know with SpamBayes for Outlook, marking a false spam as “Ham” makes it smarter.
I also am not sure how to handle an e-mail being tagged multiple times. Since I want to move e-mails to a folder based on their tag, having multiple tags throws a wrench into the process.
Not only does it make it “smarter”, but it is really essential that you train both good and bad hits.
And that is the biggest issue with TaQuilla. There really is not an adequate UI for the ham training (an issue that core Thunderbird also has for spam as well). Really the only practical way to make it work is to enable keyboard shortcuts, and then make sure that you train both good and bad items. You don’t need to actually train on rrors, you can just pick a number of existing items that hit and don’t hit, and train on those.
Hi, thanks for explaining the strategy for ham training. I think I got it and started using 3 or Alt+3 to tag or untag. I also am starting with one tag only (Personal) and see how it works. I tried five tags last night and it was a real mess. I have so many message rules right now its not even funny. I am hoping with a little training TaQuilla can help me tagged emails to the desired folder.