automatically convert email inbox into TODO's?

automatically convert email inbox into TODO's?

[Bill Jarrold]

Hi,

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? 

Thanks,

Bill

Re: automatically convert email inbox into TODO's?

[Eric S Fraga]

Bill Jarrold <wjarrold@ucdavis.edu> writes:

> Hi,
>
> Emails in ones inbox can be viewed as TODO's.
[...]

I can't help you in your question of converting emails to TODOs but I
can say that some (including myself) will argue that using emails as a
todo list is the wrong thing to do and leads to disaster (as I think you
are finding if you have 1000s of emails sitting there).

2 or so years ago, I was in the same situation.  When I hit >2000
"emails as todo items" in my inbox, I knew something was wrong.  I
switched to a 0 inbox approach with org mode.  Every email is processed
when I read it.  Most get dismissed (and I use gnus which automatically
expires my emails with an expiry period that depends on what folder the
messages are in); the ones that require action are either handled
immediately (by doing something and responding) or are converted to an
org todo item by simply highlighting the whole message ("h C-x h" in
gnus) and doing an org capture with a todo type (C-c c t).

The key, however, is to ensure you have a good automated mail splitting
approach which means you only have to read the emails you expect to read
at any particular time.  I use gnus to split my incoming mail but I used
to use procmail and then maildrop.  Mail gets sorted into a number of
folders (~6) including workplace ones, mailing lists (like this one),
hobbies, family, etc.

Anyway, I hope some of this helps.  It has helped me: my mail folders
now typically have a handful of "ticked" emails acting as todo items
(there is always the odd exception to any set of rules...) but no more.
Org is necessary for this and I couldn't have moved to this approach
without it.

cheers,
eric
-- 
: Eric S Fraga (GnuPG: 0xC89193D8FFFCF67D) in Emacs 24.0.50.1
: using Org-mode version 7.4 (release_7.4.231.ge879)

Re: automatically convert email inbox into TODO's?

[Bernt Hansen]

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