Re: automatically convert email inbox into TODO's?

[Bernt Hansen <bernt@norang.ca>]

Bill Jarrold <wjarrold@ucdavis.edu> writes:

> Emails in ones inbox can be viewed as TODO's.  org-mode and its agenda
> mech are great for managing to do's.  Thus, does anyone have
> experience with automatic conversion of emails into TODO's?
>
> Email is a pain because I do not know of any way to associate
> arbitrary levels of priorities to my email.  If I can automatically
> convert my email inbox into a set of TODO's maybe I can solve this
> problem.  With org-mode and the agenda mechanism I suspect I have a
> lot of flexibility with assigning priorities and all sorts of
> categories....
>
> ( I tend to have 1000's of messages in my inbox and the ordering is a
> mess.  As I come up to speed on org mode I have hope that it can
> handle 1000's of tasks well.  )
>
> Any pre-existing solutions for this?  Any comments on the utility of this? 

Hi Bill,

I'm thinking automatically creating TODOs for every email is overkill.

I get lots of mail everyday and I'd be completely swamped if I had a
TODO task for every one.  Lots of the mails just need to be read.  For
any that require a task I use capture mode which links to the email (I
use Gnus for reading mail).

For an email that needs a TODO task I just hit

C-M-r t Respond to Bill C-c C-c

while reading the email which creates a new todo task like this:

,----
| * TODO Respond to Bill
| [2011-01-21 Fri 18:35]
| [[gnus:nntp%2Bnews.gmane.org:gmane.emacs.orgmode#BC2207E3-BDD6-4235-986F-42693DD047E1@ucdavis.edu][Email from Bill Jarrold: automatically convert email in]]
`----

in my refile.org

This works great (for me) and you can annotate the TODO task with any
information you want.  The link to the original email is there to easily
find it back again (using C-c C-o from the org-mode task)

My INBOX is also a huge collection of emails.  I read it, and forget it.
If it is something I need to act on I create a TODO task using capture
mode while reading the email - it's a conscious decision to create the
task and it takes less than 5 seconds to manually create the capture
task.  If the email is useful (something I want to find back again
later) or something I need to act on I manually create an org-mode task
for it via capture.

I just let mail collect in my incoming folders indefinitely and tend to
not revisit them unless there is a task (and associated link) to the
email.  Someday I'll clean out my mail folders... maybe.  My current
INBOX mail count is 21549. :)

HTH,
Bernt