Toodledo MailActOn

Some Mac task management apps allow you to use a keystroke to create a task from an Apple Mail message, and then have that task link back to the Mail message. This is particularly handy if, like me, many of your tasks originate from Mail messages. If you’re a Toodledo user, you can do this as well, although it will require you to purchase a third-party Mail plugin.

To get started, you need 3 things:

  • A Mac with Mail installed;
  • MailActOn, a Mail plugin; and
  • A particular AppleScript. Find it in a post on the Smoove Operator site, a blog by Mike Hardy (there are several good tidbits on this blog, so it’s worth checking out even if you’re not using it for this script).

Once you have those items, here’s what you need to do:

1) You’ll first need to make one change to the AppleScript that you downloaded. Double-click the script file to open it for editing, then find the “example@example.com” email address within the script. Replace that address with your Toodledo email address (you can find your Toodledo email address in your Email Import/Export settings).

2) Place the AppleScript somewhere on your Mac that will be easy for you to find later.

3) Install MailActOn (there is a free trial, with the normal version costing $24.95 at the time of this writing).

4) Go into your Mail preferences, to the Rules tab, and select “Act-On Rules.” Click the “Add Rule” button, and fill out the input boxes as shown in the screenshot below:

MailActOn

In the box that is cut off in the image above (the one to the right of “Run AppleScript”) input the location of the AppleScript that you saved in Step 2. Do this by clicking on the “Choose . . .” button and navigating to the location of the script on your Mac. When you’re done, click the “OK” button.

 

What will this do? When you select a message and hit CTRL-T, it will move the message out of your inbox and into your Archive folder, change the background color of the message to green, and then open a new mail message pre-populated with your Toodledo email address, the same subject as the original message, and a link. If you hit send, the message will be sent into Toodledo and automatically turned into a task. That task in Toodledo will contain the link which, when clicked, will open the archived Mail message. Keep in mind that Toodledo pays attention to certain types of syntax in the subject line of a message, so you may need to alter the subject line of the Toodledo email message if it is going to cause a conflict or other problem.

One other tweak I’ve made is to set up a couple of TextExpander snippets to help pre-populate the subject line of the email. For example, I have one snippet that sets the task context to “Work” and the folder to “Action.”

If you know of any other ways to integrate Toodledo with Mail, let us know in the comments.