Maildrop start & end dates, projects, contexts
 

I've been starting to use the Maildrop for importing things to Omnifocus. It's nice when I'm on a Windows computer or via email actions in the iOS app Drafts.

I was curious if there was a way to have the email pre-fill start and end dates and possibly projects or contexts. The email subject is automatically converted to the action name and the rest of the text ends up as notes.

This may be an edge case, but it be nice to have even just default values automatically filled in, ie start date default to today 12am and end date defaults to today 5pm or (or + some number of days). I'd like to have stuff come in to Omnifocus with the details more filled in so that I don't have to do as much work for the task to be properly entered.

If you're talking about mailing actions in via the Omni Sync Server, the answer is that you can't do any of what you requested at the moment.

If you have the Mac application, and can leave your computer running when you aren't at it, you do have the option of continuing to use the old approach of email to yourself using either a special subject line or address and having the Mail app (which has to be left running) invoke a script provided by OmniFocus to insert the actions in your Inbox. With that approach, you can specify start and due dates, context, project, and flag status. If you don't have the Mail app running, the actions don't get added to OmniFocus until you next open Mail on your Mac; that may be quite acceptable for some or all of your actions, especially if it is more important to capture all of the information up front than it is to have it appear in OmniFocus as soon as possible. You can use both approaches simultaneously.

For details on the "old" approach, see the help for "Processing Mail messages into actions" in OmniFocus for Mac.

I know you're busy with OmniFocus 2 but
 

Has there been any movement on adding some kind of support for more information appearing in an item when sent to Mail Drop?

I'm a software developer and would be happy to work with you to write some kind of extension to make this possible (learning whatever tech stack is required). It would really help me in my current work situation if I could specify things like context, project and due date.

I see many possible ways to do this (special syntax in the subject, name,value tags at the start of the body, JSON, etc.)

Thanks,
Brian

[QUOTE=Brian Gilstrap;126827]I'm a software developer and would be happy to work with you to write some kind of extension to make this possible (learning whatever tech stack is required).[/QUOTE]

You should contact the Omni Group directly, after all this is just a user forum.

I'd love to see Maildrop taken to the next level, too. It's by far the most useful way to get tasks into OmniFocus. It would be tremendously more helpful if there was a simple syntax to specify all the essentials.

I'd love to have it because assigning dates, contexts, etc. in the inbox wouldn't be that tedious with such a syntax. This would benefit all people who love automating their workflow on iOS and OS X.

By the way: I love Don Southard's CLI script for the Mac. If such a thing would work with MailDrop… [url]http://www.dirtdon.com/?p=963[/url]

+1 on beefing up mail drop

+1 for me too... Many other (worse than OF) "task management" software already implemented this feature
Hope to see it soon!

As someone who recently migrated to a Windows environment at work, +10 for me!! I love the simplicity of being able to fwd work emails to my mail drop, but i miss being able to do more.

This isn't an edge case.

Remember The Milk, an online task manager, has a great implementation of this idea and it is very popular.

It allows you to set many parameters e.g. Due Date, tags, smart lists and priorities.

[url]https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/email/[/url]

+1 I've sent it as a support email but would be really helpful, I could use drafts for example with actions to go into specific contexts and notebooks.