Hi all,

I have made a little perl script to be able to create a new task in Tracks by sending an email to a specific email address which is then forwarded to Tracks using the API. It works by attaching itself as an email filter to Sendmail, so you need to have access to Sendmail in order to use it.

See http://www.balt.nu/lrbalt/archives/2006/10/03/email-tracks-integration/ for details.

Unfortunately the Tracks API does not support filling the notes of a new action so you can store the content of the email in it. I did put an enhancement request in Trac for it.

Nice!

Eventually, I think we’ll enable direct sending of actions via email, but that’s a way in the future, so this is a very nice intermediate step.

Hi

It’s great using a PDA with email capabilities to enter tasks at any moment that you want it off your mind.

Do you think it is difficult to add the option to also add notes using the XMLRPC interface?

I was able to add the option to fill in the notes field to the new todo by changing the api and the backend_controller. See http://www.balt.nu/lrbalt/archives/2006/10/24/add-notes-to-the-tracks-backend-api/ for details.

Reinier Balt: That’s nice!

Hello guys, and Happy New Year!
I am very interested about a way to send email bodies as notes into tracks. However, the link to http://www.balt.nu/lrbalt/archives/2006/10/24/add-notes-to-the-tracks-backend-api/ does not work. Any mirror?

thanks

Hi,

The site should now be back up after an upgrade to Fedora Core 6.

Please note that mime-messages do not work yet. Plain test messages do work

Thanks Reiner.

I was playing with your method and wrote a script which inserts a link to the email message into the note field. When clicked, the email message opens. The downside to this (like the Yojimbo tip somewhere else) is that if you keep tracks on a server and work on different computers (like me, one @home and one @work), you will not be able to get back the message on the other computer. This makes me wondering about a possible development direction:

How hard it will be to have Tracks uploading email files into some sort of server (ftp, webdav, etc), tag them with their unique message ID, record a link into the notes field and use only the link to retrieve the message from an action? It may look like a complication but guess it’s not, for a number of reasons:
- email is one of the biggest “suplliers” of actions; tighter integration, independent of context will be useful.
- using the notes field for the body is good only for reference. If you need to do something with that email it gets complicated (copy paste stuff)
- the logic behind this can be used for the “reference” box, now missing from Tracks
If properly done, you can send basicaly anything into Tracks, linked to the right action or project or “box” and then retrieve it wherevere you are when the need occurs, with Tracks only handling links into notes field.

I plan to play a bit with an applescript to to this, I’ll let you know. The dream will be to have a Quicksilver action wich walks you through a number of dialogs (pulldown menus) and let you add any document to any action or project with some key strokes.

I guess there are two options: 1. adding this to tracks. 2. add this to your tracks-email integration script. I think the kiss-approach of tracks will rule out 1. So you can try to do this using 2. Shouldn’t be too hard, although I don’t know about integration issues using different email clients (gmail/yahoo/hotmail, outlook, thunderbird, etc.)

Reinier

I’ve just posted a new topic about creating a new action from any document. It includes most of your work on the subject. The script works ok for me and it’s easy to adapt it to handle email files from Apple Mail. (each email has an URL and a unique ID accesible by applescript)
For now I am happy and it solves my problem. By using it, I can see also how my Inbox in Tracks becomes a real inbox, with emails, files and even scans, not only an action inbox.

Impressive! Need to work on that one (not being a apple user…)

I’m having trouble with this because I’m not able to connect on port 3000.  I have Tracks running beautifully on Dreamhost, I managed to wrestle the e-mail configuration into submission (using .procmailrc rather than /etc/aliases), I got past Dreamhost’s “no localhost for mysql” issue, but now my .procmail log indicates that it can’t connect on port 3000.  I think this is the last problem I have standing between me and email-to-Tracks bliss!

Can anyone explain where port 3000 comes into it, and whether there’s something besides http://$HOST:$PORT/backend/api I can point to, even if it’s less secure?

edit: Nevermind, I’ve solved it!  One simply leaves out the port altogether.  Amazing…it took me almost an entire day to get it working, but I can now e-mail actions to my Tracks installation on Dreamhost.

For those interrested. I’ve changed my script to be able to add MIME messages (e.q. html email) to the notes field of an action that you add through email. See http://www.balt.nu/lrbalt/archives/2007/02/12/filtering-email-to-add-as-a-note-to-an-action/