Integration with Microsoft Outlook and Mail

As the rest of you, I am using OmniFocus to keep track of what I have to do. I use Microsoft Outlook for my work mail and MacOS’ builtin Mail app for private mail. It would be really great to have good integration so that you can easily create a task from a mail.

Some suggestions:

  • Dragging a mail from Outlook and Mail should open the new task window with title and description filled out. Attachments should be added as an attachment to the task.
  • When dragging an attachment from a mail/calendar item in Outlook or Mail into a task it should be able to add this as an attachment to the task.

I have created a few scripts that allows me to create tasks from mail, but they forget any attachments and it really feels like a workaround.

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I use OF2 with Catalina. I changed job and ended up using (on the mac of course) dropzone to drag a copy of an Outlook email, or a file/link to file, to a finder folder. Then hazel to automatically create an OF task in the inbox, that contains a link to that file.

Found out some nasty OF bugs with attachments, that “forget” links and do not show up in ios sometimes. But, I discovered the method above is a very simple way to be able to search not only OF tasks but also the content of attachments through spotlight, instead of “hiding” them inside OF.

I also have a more complex way to mirror projects as folders in finder, drag items into these folder and those items get added to the project as attachments and the project gets flagged. But that could be a bit overkill, depending on what you need.
However it solves the issue we see today with OF because the finder structure with the files is still there even if the OF link is broken. So it is a reliable point of reference to “search by/in attachments” and you can manipulate files further with hazel rules as well.

There is no sign that Microsoft Outlook will ever integrate with OF, which is a competitor, and in general to support in a meaningful way AppleScript (callback to mail does not exist or is clunky) and Outlook code is pretty nasty to look at.

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