Simplicity Is Bliss

Indev from Canada have brought enhancements to Apple’s Mail.app for a very long time now and have been amongst the pioneers of email tagging on Mac OS X. Whilst I personally use Postbox instead of Mail.app today, I still dig Indev’s extensions to Mail.app and follow the developments. Most notably MailTags has become an integrated part of many people’s workflows and while Indev has been silent for a long while, they have now released a new version of their flagship product.

While it is ‘only’ a minor version update, the changes are improvements are significant. Most important to all OmniFocus (as well as Things) and Mail.app users: The integration between MailTags and your favourite task manager has been taken to new highs. Since quite a long time OmniFocus had the ability to match the project set for a message by MailTags with a project in OmniFocus when the message was clipped. But you had to manually create or at least import a up-to-date project list for that.

Also the MailTags keywords have been used by people for example to automatically add messages tagged ‘waiting for’ to their OmniFocus ‘waiting for’ context. Assigning certain message to people or agenda is another often practiced use.

What people have been eagerly awaiting is the ability to ‘sync’ the project list between OmniFocus and MailTags. MailTags always had the above mentioned project field, but it was self-maintained inside the MailTags preference pan and despite several attempts even the best AppleScript gurus weren’t able to establish any sort of sync between the OmniFocus and MailTags project lists. All that was left was a clunky text file based import/export option.

These days are gone. You can now simply select to have OmniFocus projects show directly inside (and in addition to MailTags’ own projects) Mail.app’s tagging panel. Only caveat is that you need to have OmniFocus running to get access to it’s project list. You can do the same for CulturedCode’s Things or even for both if you are one of these indecisive productivity nuts that can’t settle with one system.

Once you have enabled the integration, the projects from within OmniFocus are listed in MailTags project drop-down. While this initially doesn’t look like a big deal, it actually can become one depending of what you make of it. Thinking of inbox and outbox rules, Smart Mailboxes and Applescript, I sense a whole new dimension of possibilities here:

• Retrieve all project related emails in one click using a Mail.app Smart Mailbox
• Trigger the access to the Smart Mailbox from within OmniFocus using AppleScript
• Automatically assign emails based on sender, sender group or a string in the subject or even email body to the right project using inbox rules
• Not only track ‘waiting fors’ by context but also by project with no additional effort

I am confident that lots of the smarty pants using the combination of Mail.app, MailTags and OmniFocus will come up with even better use cases and additional bells and whistles. I can only hope that the good folks at Postbox will follow Indev’s example and tighten up the quite natural between email and task management.

For now: Head to Indev’s website and get yourself the latest version of MailTags. Don’t forget to report back and share how you use the new project list integration.

A very long time ago, I published an Applescript I’ve created that uses Mail-Act-On 2 and MailTags by indev.ca to create a task in Omnifocus for messages you send out that you need answer or follow up (“Waiting For’s” in GTD terms). While I haven’t been working on the script ever since, the brave community in the Omnigroup’s Omnifocus forum did.

They refined the script, fixed some issues and when Scott Morrison from indev.ca got involved himself, the script evolved to utilise most of MailTags incredible power, e.g. using the project field of MailTags to add the task to the right project in Omnifocus if there is a matching one or even add a due date to the task based on the Tickler Date (if set) of MailTags.

Awesome community development. Make sure you check out the thread in the Omnifocus forum for more variations and further enhancements.

I believe the latest version has a bit of an issue and isn’t adding the task to Omnifocus, if the Tickler Date isn’t set. It still triggers the Growl notification, but the task never appears in Omnifocus. Hopefully I’ll have time to look into this and provide an update.

I’ve decided to leave the script source in the capable hands of the Omnifocus Forum community. Hence refer to the corresponding thread there to obtain the latest version and any updates.

I’ve published an Applescript that, with some help of MailTags, automatically adds emails by which you delegated tasks to OmniFocus. Since only minimal adjustments in the code were required to made it work for Things as well. I’ve modified the script accordingly.

Script Functionality

1. Based on a specific MailTag in Mail.app you can invoke a outbox rule which will start the script (I use “@Waiting” in MailTags as well and simply applied it to those emails I write which need to be tracked for response)
2. The script adds a task with the title “<recipient> to come back re <subject>”. The text in the middle can be configured in the script and if you have more than one recipient (CC and BCC recipients are ignores) the script will take the first recipient and add “and x more” automatically.
3. The task includes a link back to the original message in the notes section (and the actual mail body, if desired), is automatically assigned with a “@waiting” tag (configurable) and placed into Things’ inbox
4. If you have Growl installed and running, the script will give visual feedback once the task has been created

Installation of the script

1. You will need MailTags from Indev to later built the proper Mail.app outbox rule
2. Download the script and copy it into your standard script directory, e.g. ~/Users/<your username>/Library/Scripts/
3. Modify the script configuration based on your needs and setup
4. Create a outbox rule in Mail.App that invokes the script if specific conditions, i.e. MailTags Keyword of the message is “@Waiting”, are met

Customising the key parameters

Inside the script you can and very likely should change some configuration properties to match your requirements and setup.

• property mailBody : true - You should change this setting to ‘false’ if you do not want the entire body text of the email to be pasted into the Things task’s note section.
• property MidFix : "to come back re" - Change this text to whatever you like to see in the task title between the email recipient’s name and the email’s subject.
• property myWFTag : "@waiting" - This variable needs to exactly match the name of the tag in Things that you’d like to use for “Waiting For” items, i.e. “@waiting”.

Creating the outbox rule in Mail.app

Next you need to create a outbox rule in Mail.app that looks similar to the one below. Again MailTags will be required to perform this action.

With this last step you should be up and running. Enjoy and please let me know how this script works for you.