GMail instead of Mail.app
 

An issue I have encountered is that I would love to use the email integration, but I am not a user of Mail.app. I personally (and for a variety of reasons that fit the way I work) use GMail. Has anyone found a good way to connect GMail to OmniFocus, of does anyone know if this is a planned feature?

Now I know I could set up Mail.app to connect to GMail via IMAP and get things to work that way, but it would be suboptimal. It would just be running there for integration and not be used otherwise.

I've heard of folks using the google notifier app to pass OF tasks along to gmail. I went as far as installing it and using it to verify a bug fix, but beyond that I can't claim experience.

[URL="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/09/gmail-notifier-for-mac-os-x.html"]Gmail notifier for OS X[/URL]

I switched between Mail.app (IMAP from my GMail account) and just plain Gmail, and what worked for me when using Gmail was using Mailplane.app - the idea is a desktop 'window' into the regular Gmail web interface. One of the things it does that helps it integrate with OF is that you can 'Copy Mailplane Mail URL' (or something to that effect) and then paste it into OF, which gives you a hyperlink that'll open Mailplane and navigate to that message.

[url]http://mailplaneapp.com/beta/index.html[/url]

I ended up switching back to Mail.app with IMAP. Hope that helps!

@Brian: I will look into that. Thanks you.

@Mikeyk22: I have used Mailplane in it's early days, so it is worth taking another look at. GMail's web client is the best answer for me in the way I like to work. I have used it for years now and have no desire to return to a client side app for mail. I know people who love Mail.app, but it has never been the answer for me.

It is my hope that one OF is fully baked that it will be easy to have plug-ins for different mail systems, and different calendaring systems. I would love to have something that I could just point at an IMAP source and periodically look for changes in a "OmniFocus" folder, and then take action on it. Perhaps even looking for an iCalendar attachment... (a man can wish, and ultimately write it if need be)

Just to have this on the record, [URL="http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050914172019276&lsrc=osxh"]this article[/URL] on macoshints shows how to add AppleScript handlers to GMail Notifier

Here's a plug-in to handle that using Google Notifier. Pretty bare bones, right now. Just looks for messages prepended with "--" and goes from there. I'll probably put a little more work into it so that it works similarly to the Mail rule's script and checks for valid senders, etc.

[CODE](* Plug-in for Google Notifier to search for OF task messages and process them *)

on NewMessagesReceived(messages, fullCount)
repeat with msg in messages
if title of msg begins with "--" then
tell application "OmniFocus" to tell default document
parse tasks with transport text title of msg

-- Since Google Notifier doesn't pass the whole email, we only parse the subject and then append the rest as a note
set newTask to item 1 of result
set note of newTask to summary of msg & (return) & link of msg -- Links are wrong for hosted accounts
end tell
end if
end repeat
end NewMessagesReceived[/code]

You can also use Gmail's RSS feed to do the same thing using a utility like Proxi. This has the advantage of not re-processing already read emails, as Notifier will. (It runs all its rules on all incoming messages each time it starts up -- a giant PITA)

@iNik: That is awesome. Thank you!