Enhancing note taking - directly connecting to emails with Mail.app

Published by neil on March 10th, 2007

One of the big problems in working an effective GTD system is making everything play nice together - connecting all those micro systems which form part of the ideal GTD solution.

As well as recording what I need to do, I have lately taken to recording what I’ve done. I keep a basic journal (in a Mori document) of what I’ve been doing each day (work-wise), who I’ve spoken to, when, why, and the resulting action if necessary. It helps sift through the noise sometimes… so many conversations. So imagine how helpful it would be to add a journal note concerning an email received or sent and be able to directly link from the journal to the email itself.

What I have discovered is that MailTags (mentioned previously here) does something similar when you use it to create an iCal event or task which is related to an email. It uses it’s own message:// protocol which when clicked in iCal, immediately pops up the related email message in Mail. Sweet. You must have MailTags installed- a plugin to Mail.app - for the message:// protocol to work.

Then came along this tip at Mac OSX Hints: Get Mail message IDs via AppleScript and MailTags
The hint contains a small AppleScript which utilises the MailTags’ message:// protocol to generate a message’s unique ID and make it an active, clickable link. The AppleScript was a little useless in itself as it only seemed to open the currently selected mail message, so with some minor tweaking I reworked it to build the unique email ID and copy the generated URI to the clipboard. Now all I need do is have the required email message selected in Mail, pop over to my Mori journal, trigger the AppleScript, then paste the generated link into the journal page. Clicking on the link, immediately pops up the associated email message, thus connecting the journal entry to the email.

Here’s the script:

tell application “Mail”
set theSelectedMessages to selection
set the selected_message to item 1 ¬
of the theSelectedMessages
set message_id to the message id of the selected_message
end tell

set message_url to “message://” & message_id
set the clipboard to message_url

Now if only I can do a similar thing to directly connect a journal entry to someone in AddressBook.

Tags: applescript, crm, Getting it Done, GTD, journal, Mail, MailTags, Mori, organisation, plugin, TechGeek
Posted in Getting it Done, TechGeek |