Marking outgoing emails for follow-up

Hi,

A lot of the email I send out are messages I need to follow up on at a later stage. Right now, my approach is to review my outbox every week and then read every message I sent to catch up on any developments (yay for 'organize by conversation') and either archive if case closed or follow up. It's a bit tedious and requires me to read a lot of messages I shouldn't have to. It also means that in some cases I am sitting with somebody in my team and I'll miss an opportunity to check on status because I haven't added the issue to my 'to do' app yet.

What I'm looking for is this ...

While I'm composing a new message or writing a response to an existing message, I want to be able to mark this message for follow-up.

Here is what I've done so far ...

I know I can mark a message with a flag after it has been sent. But those are a significant number of added clicks and not a very elegant solution.

Same goes for tools like MailHub, which let me mark emails after they have been sent.

I've considered writing a script that gets triggered upon email send, popping up a dialog asking to flag the message or not. With Mail Act-On, I can run scripts that way. Better, but could get rather annoying quite quickly.

I've found MailTags, but it slows down Mail and the horrid user interface makes my eyes hurt.

And while the keynote showing off Mavericks had me hoping the tags would be in Mail too, I installed the beta and it seems there is no tag support included in Mail. I guess one can hope it will get added before final release, but I am thinking it will not be.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who faces this situation.

Any recommendations?

cheers,

Rob