On Wed, Jul 18, 2007 at 12:29:08PM +0200, Georg C. F. Greve wrote:
> Since I know which group I am asking to move things to, being able to
> link to the message ID directly would definitely solve the problem, and
> maybe even more elegantly, as it should be robust against resorting the
> mail group.

Funnily enough, I implemented exactly this idea about 15 months ago,
except that my implementation uses mairix (the mail indexer), and is
mode-agnostic.  I use mutt as my mail reader, so the usage workflow is
this:

  1. Read a mail which requires a TODO action

  2. Hit a keypress combo which triggers a Perl script acting on the
     mail to extract the Message-ID and dump it to a predictably-named
     temporary file, which can be considered as a dedicated clipboard.

  3. In emacs, hit another keypress combo to yank the contents of the
     clipboard into a new item in my TODO.org file as a link, e.g.:

       * NEXTACTION [#B] read this email about blah blah
         <mairix://m:4679BAC0.4057103@spiers.net>

  4. Archive the mail anywhere, safe in the knowledge that later on,
     moving the point over this mairix:// link within emacs and
     pressing another keypress combo will perform a mairix search for
     this Message-ID, and launch a mutt window displaying the mail,
     regardless of wherever it's been archived.

At first I thought that this was just a cute little trick, but it's
proved itself to be an absolute god-send:

  - emails can be converted into TODO items and cleared out of my
    inbox within seconds.  Anyone trying to follow GTD already knows
    the huge value of being able to quickly process an inbox.

  - Having mail linked to like this (and in general having it indexed
    and instantly searchable) means that I no longer have to make sure
    mails are carefully archived in the right folder according to
    topic.  This used to be very time-consuming, and didn't always
    work, e.g. when a single mail covered more than one topic.  These
    days, I simply have one archive folder per month to keep folder
    sizes manageable.

  - The URL-like syntax allows me to store hyperlinks which trigger
    more complex queries rather than just searching for a single
    message id, e.g.

       <mairix://s:orgmode>

    would find all mails with 'orgmode' in the subject.

I made it mode-agnostic because I also wanted to be able to link to
mails from within source code comments, log files, muse-mode, etc.
Having said that, if there is a generic mode-agnostic hyperlinking
framework in emacs, I really should have my wrist slapped for
reinventing the wheel.  In particular, I do wish that org-mode and
muse-mode had the same hyperlinking syntax ...

Anyway, source code for my hacks attached.

Cheers,
Adam