Re: [Orgmode] import mail messages like mhc?

[Ben Alexander]

On 2008-Oct-25, at 16:39, address@hidden wrote:

From: address@hidden

Date: 25 October 2008 13:10:27 BST

To: address@hidden

Subject: [Orgmode] import mail messages like mhc?

Hi All;

I am currently using a Frankenstein-duct-tape-monster made from mhc
and org-mode to track time and manage todos. For various reasons I
would like to switch to just org-mode. One thing I really like about
mhc is the ability to semi-automatically turn a mail message (in
e.g. mew, gnus, wanderlust) into an agenda item/todo.  Partly this is
because mhc agenda items are MH messages, but the thing I would like
to copy is that it reads the message body and surprisingly often
guesses the date and time of an appointment. Before I try to port this
to org-mode, has someone already done something similar?

David

Completely unrelated to org-mode:

I would love to move my email to Emacs and use something like this, but I the only solutions I can understand rely on moving mail from my IMAP based inbox onto the local system.  This is good; I want offline access.  But this is bad: I want to refile email entries and move the messages on IMAP server into folders.  Everything I've read indicates that once the mail has been downloaded to my laptop, any organization is only local, and not synced back to the IMAP folders.  (And no, unfortunately I don't have login access to my IMAP server -- I do have ftp access though)

Does anyone have some cheap advice on mixing email and org-mode?

Back to org-mode:

Since I haven't gotten any further than wishing Emacs could read my mail, I haven't looked to see if the (org-store-link) does the right magic thing in Rmail and/or Gnus.  According the org-mode manual, there is all kinds of support for linking from your org-mode buffer back to the original email.  And in terms of finding the right date from your mail message, I think the date parsing routine that C-. (org-time-stamp) uses absolutely rocks.

For example, I just tried pasting the header from your email into the minibuffer after a 'C-.'.  Org-mode didn't recognize the date because of the cruft of the To: field and the Subject: field.  But within the minibuffer, I could hit C-p to get the the line with the date and *poof* like magic it found the date.  And the minibuffer shows you what  date it has computed.

It did have a bit more trouble finding things like 'See you next Monday', But since C-k C-a and C-e work in the minibuffer, you might be able to yank the entire message into the buffer and then kill the text that doesn't have the date you want.  Well, for short emails anyway.

-Ben