Feature request - POP3 to task
 

I've set myself up an "action" email account on my server and in apple-mail. I've set up rules to adress it in apple mail.

Any email addressed to "action@audiosupergeek.com" goes into this account. When it gets downloaded by apple-mail, Curt's "Add OmniFocus Action" script is run, adding it to OF. Then the mail is moved to deleted items. Now I can add actions from anyplace I have email access, including my Treo and other computers.

The only bummer is that Mail needs to open and check mail to proccess the incoming tasks and hand them over to OF. Wouldn't it be cool if OF could automatically connect via POP3 in the background on load, download my "action emails" to the inbox and erase them from the server? Not any full email integration, but just this basic processing? (I'm probably dreaming, but I sure would love it.)

In the spirit of GTD, I'm trying to get out of the habit of constantly checking email. I'm trying to only check it 3 times a day and process the entire inbox, then move on. It's a bummer to need to load Apple mail to process my "ActionMail" when I really only want OF open, because that inbox just begs to be read.

Actually - I'm mistaken. Curt's script adds a task using the highlighted message, not the incoming message. Therefore rule integration doesn't quite work. I'm not applescripter – can anyone advise on this?

(Curt's script – [url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3809[/url])

[QUOTE=johnrover]Actually - I'm mistaken. Curt's script adds a task using the highlighted message, not the incoming message. Therefore rule integration doesn't quite work. I'm not applescripter – can anyone advise on this[/QUOTE]

From Apple Mail help:

[QUOTE]When Mail invokes an AppleScript as a rule action, it looks for a handler named "perform mail action with messages," which receives a list of messages as its direct object, with an optional parameter that specifies the rule being executed. Once you have the rule object and the list of messages, you can access all the properties that are shown in Mail's AppleScript dictionary for these objects.[/QUOTE]

So it should be straightforward to create a script that creates actions for every matched rule. I've added creating such a script to my "Migrate to OmniFocus" project, but if someone else created it first that would be great.

[QUOTE=johnrover]The only bummer is that Mail needs to open and check mail to proccess the incoming tasks and hand them over to OF.
...
It's a bummer to need to load Apple mail to process my "ActionMail" when I really only want OF open, because that inbox just begs to be read.[/QUOTE]
Not to over-complicate this, but you should be able to set up a chron tab to run an applescript that checks only that one account and sends it to OF, thus bypassing Mail.app altogether. The bad part is that the code that parses the email to OF relies on Mail.app, so it would need to be re-written.

But an interesting idea. I may give it a shot over the weekend.

[URL="http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3809#post15184"]The new version of my scripts[/URL] works manually or as part of a rule in Mail. I'll leave the cron-POP3 idea to kmarkley.

Cheers,

Curt