[X4U] Anybody using MailTags?

[Robert Nicholson]

So it would seem that MailTags is the best way for me to do what I  
want. That is I maintain a whitelist of people who can send me email  
and typically my server tags the email (by adding a header as the  
message was delivered) as to whether the sender was on this whitelist  
or not and I use rules in mail.app to colorize the message but since  
I cannot edit the headers later if I add a sender of a message to the  
whitelist Mail.app will never know that that email is now on the  
whitelist so the only way it seems is to use an additional rule using  
MailTags keywords whereby when I decide that I add a message's sender  
to the whitelist I simply add a MailTags keyword to the message.

Is that the only way to do what I want?

I had another approach whereby I also maintained the whitelist in  
addressbook and have applescript to add/remove from that addressbook  
group but addressbook doesn't seem to scale very well when you add a  
lot of contacts like this to it. This approach used the member in  
group rule criteria to colorize the email.

Colorizing the email using rules seems to be problematic because  the  
color set is persistent. That is if you later change the rule the  
color doesn't change. Specifically if you set the color based on some  
criteria and later decide you won't want that criteria to apply it  
seems that only way is to explicitly set the colors to the defaults  
using a specific rule. I don't know of a way in Mail.app to simply  
remove the "color" element from the xml stanza thats put in the  
message file.