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I’ve done a quick screencast demonstrating my current, simplified system for creating tasks using Mail.app. I use Mail.app, iGTD and MailTags in the screencast to create tasks and archive important emails with links back to the original emails. I’m new at the screencasting thing, so forgive my amateur approach…
It’s an very interesting approach with the @INBOX smart folder, but what do you do if you don’t have access to Mail.app and want to check your email account?
I mean such a full IMAP mailbox archive would mess things totally up for me (think about scenarios where you want to check your mails on the road with a PDA or just use webmail).
Webmail has never been a problem for me. I archive all older messages and clean my IMAP out (backed up to disc and cataloged) pretty regularly. But I have my Hoarde account set up to just show the newest messages in the inbox by default and it’s never caused a problem. I don’t ever access my IMAP account via mobile solutions other than my cell phone, and the app I have on that only looks for unread messages. I’m certain that the solution won’t work for everyone, but it’s only an aside in the screencast anyway.
Thanks for the response and for the screencast (yeah, I forgot it).
I tried out your solution and it works pretty fine. Until now I had a more complicated system with four smart folders in every app (todo, deferred, waiting and archive). This was crappy and too much overhead. Now I migrated the whole stuff into iGTD (because I completely forgot how much applications iGTD “knows”) and now I’ve everything at one central point.
I think I will make another screencast based on yours (if this no problem for you?) It would be in german, so you wouldn’t understand that much, I think ;)
And the “show only unread messages” trick is the killer!
@Rafael: The only German I know I learned from watching German movies with subtitles. I used to have a shirt that said “was haben meine Eltern falsch getan?” My parents gave it to me, but it was a while before I figured out what it said ;).
Anyway, I just deleted all of my previous smart folders (similar to yours) about 2 weeks ago. I realized that I was archiving everything twice and it was far simpler to streamline and use just iGTD, since that’s where all of the tasks would end up anyway, and the links back to the emails were automatically preserved. I even use iGTD in lieu of Yojimbo for most file archiving now, placing the files in an appropriate storage location and then making an archive item with a link to the file. I’m working on a utility that will streamline that process as well.
Feel free to reproduce/evolve the screencast in any way you see fit. It’s far from complete, so any additions are welcome!
Maybe I need to re-watch the screencast, but I didn’t pick up how MailTags really figured into the workflow. Regardless, though, it was a good demonstration of the link between Mail.app and iGTD. I also like the smart folder for Unread messages — I’m going to add that now!
I listed Mailtags because it’s been my assumption that the link back to the original message in iGTD functions through Mailtags. I may be wrong on that point, but I’ve never bothered uninstalling Mailtags to find out…
You’re right Brett. The link back to the original email does work through MailTags, as you can see from the bottom of the following page:
http://bargiel.home.pl/iGTD/help/usingtasks/adding/fkey/index.html.
Ah, OK. I started using both MailTags and iGTD around the same time, and I guess I had never picked up on the fact that it was MailTags that made those links possible — I was assuming that that was possible with “plain old Mail.app” as well.
I’m glad you’re blogging about your experiences with these tools. Even though I’m already a convert, I think a lot of Mac users will benefit from learning about this stuff.
Thank you for your great advices with information management. I’ve had problems with too much info too weak management system for ages and this is worth trying out.
Can you confirm that e-mail links from iGTD really don’t work unless I have MailTags installed, even though the links to the e-mails are shown in iGTD without MailTags istalled to my computer?
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