Open email links in Outlook and not in Apple Mail

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

I frequently import emails to OF via the omni-email address. Have a keyboard maestro shortcut for that which works great. BUT, when I click the link within OF, it tries to open the original message in Apple Mail, and not Outlook - which is my default mail client. Does anyone have a fix?? I know this has been explored before but in much older versions so hoping there is some solution now (using OF4 and updated Mac OS). Thans!

#2

Can someone please respond to this?

#3

I looked into this a bit because I’m also stuck using “new” Outlook at work. I eventually stumbled on what I think is a non-answer answer, which is this:

All email have a message-id header. The link Outlook inserts (other clients I tested don’t include a link) when you forward a message to OmniFocus are URL-encoded, and basically look like message:<MESSAGEIDSERVERID@SERVERID.EXCHANGESERVER.SUBDOMAIN.outlook.com>, where MESSAGEID is the same as the message-id included in its header.

If you can find a way to intercept that link and redirect it, you might be able to open it in the web version of Outlook as detailed here. I’m not sure if the message: portion is at all related to the macOS Mail message:// URL scheme or not.

That’s as far as I’ve gotten.

#4

Thanks very much. That level of detail is a bit above my head, though…no idea how to intercept links etc. Odd that this doesn’t work as I imagine many people used Outlook on Mac and would have same issue.

#5

Ultimately, I think this is an Outlook issue, not an OmniFocus issue. The “new” version of Outlook on macOS doesn’t even support AppleScript, and message:// is tied to Mail.app at the system level.

#6

I believe message:// is tied to whatever is set as the default email client in the OS. On a new Mac, that is the Mail app. If you choose to use Outlook, you should change it to be the default mail client.

However as others have stated if Outlook doesn’t use normal OS hooks for email it wouldn’t work correctly. That would be something to check with Microsoft.

Personally, I did the opposite. My work email used Outlook, but I setup on my Mac to use the Mail client instead. I find Outlook very limited and hate combining calendar and mail.

#7

I can confirm this: my default email client is MailMate, which is compatible with the message:// scheme, and when I click on a message URL, it opens in MailMate.

This being said, I don’t know if Outlook supports any deep linking scheme. Years ago I used Spark—which has a different URL scheme—for a while, and I wrote a script to convert the two schemes between each other.

#8

Thank you. Do you (or anyone) have suggestions on how to find someone to hire to look into this for me. I can’t write script.

#9

Interesting. I have Outlook set as my default mail client on my work machine, but it does not take over the handling of the message:// scheme—that’s still being handled by Mail (verified by running /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -dump URLSchemeBinding).

#10

I did a quick search and, from what I can see, Outlook does not support any URL scheme. It did in the past, but the feature was removed.

As for the specific scheme, not all email apps use message://, and not all use message IDs compatible with Mail.app. I like MailMate, even if it hasn’t been updated in a while, and it does support message://, but I remember Spark used a different scheme (spark:// if I’m not mistaken), although it was possible to derive Spark’s IDs from Mail’s and vice versa.

1 Like
#11

As much as I’d like to help, I think you are out of luck with Outlook.

#12

This sounds like it might be something you could achieve using the app “OpenIn” which is on setapp if you have that.
It is able to be set as the default email handler and then redirect the opening of emails to different email applications.
I use it for opening URLs in various browsers and profiles.
It also has the option to rewrite the url passed to it on the way through.

I don’t use outlook so can’t say for sure if will solve your problem.

#13

I agree that Outlook is quite limited so I prefer Spark which also comes with integration both to OmniFocus and Evernote (which I use) and several others.