hi all,
problem:
I had a disconnect between emails and OF todos and receive a lot of emails, so wanted something as direct and smooth as possible to clearly triage my emails. I wanted to have a clear way to say “this was sent to OF” “this was not sent to OF” and what is the status of that task in OF.
to do that, until now, required to have OF open on another window, crosschecking back and forth.
I ended up learning some basic stuff about imap tags and found finally a way to make email actually talk to OF thanks to N8N.
I just want to share what I did as it is way more basic and simple than expected.
if you want to know more please comment.
in my mail client I add a flag “/Tasks” to an email (I use emClient but that applies to many other mail clients that support sending imap tags to the servers).
in N8N (you can do the same with other similar workflow tools) I take all emails with that flag, and for each I take the email, the body, etc, and create an OF task for it with mail drop, then replace the tag in the imap server to /OmniFocus once done.
it seems the same of OF Mail Drop, but it is superior for my use case because:
-
it does not require me to spend time forwarding stuff.
-
I can deeply customize the task created with nice body and nice subject, applying AI reasoning if required, an email emoji, etc.
-
most importantly as next step, I plan to enable the backward loop from OF to email: save the UID of the email into a db, query the backup of the OF DB for its status periodically, and mirror back the OF task status into the email tags (e.g. /Done, /Waiting, /OverDue…) , including deep link to the task, to be seen automatically by my email clients.
