Re: [Orgmode] Re: Email from org?

[David Maus]

Ethan Ligon wrote:
>Eric Schulte <schulte.eric <at> gmail.com> writes:
>>
>> See http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-mime.php for information on
>> exporting Org-mode documents to email, and on using Org-mode syntax to
>> compose email.
>>
>Thanks for the suggestions regarding org-mime.  I can see that it
>would be very useful for composing complicated email.  But I have what
>I think is actually a much simpler problem: *sending* email from an
>org-file.

>I have in mind something like:

FIY: There was a longer debate about such a feature back in 2009.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.emacs.orgmode/19705/focus=19778

>#+TYP_TODO: EMAIL SENT WAITING | DONE

>* Broadcasting project
>** EMAIL What is the optimal frequency?
>   :PROPERTIES:
>   :To:       address@hidden
>   :END:
>   Dear Ken-

>   Could you please let me know when you've made progress on computing
>   the optimal frequency?

>   Thanks,
>   -Ethan

>Then a transition in workflow state from EMAIL to WAITING would cause
>(perhaps via org-mime) the construction of an email

>  From: address@hidden
>  To: address@hidden
>  Subject: What is the optimal frequency?
>  Date: Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:36:14 -0700

>  Dear Ken-

>  Could you please let me know when you've made progress on computing
>  the optimal frequency?

>  Thanks,
>  -Ethan

>which would then be automagically fed into an SMTP client for
>delivery.

IMO this would be overkill: Even if the SMTP dialog is done be an
external library, preparing a message for transmission through email
subsystem has a lot of bells and whistles and pits you can fall
into.

>Critically, one would *not* need to interrupt one's work >flow in
>order to go mess around with a mail client; a simple \C-c\C-t >or
>similar would send the email on its way.

No threading in Emacs, so you would have to wait for the sending
process or figure out a reliable way for asynchronous sending.

>Or very possibly there's an obvious way to accomplish a similar end
>that hasn't occurred to me.  Maybe the act of composing an email in a
>mail buffer could also format and re-file the message in an org-file,
>leading to a workflow similar to what one gets with org-capture?

I think this is the path to follow.  The question is what we would
like to achieve.  If it is keeping track of sent and received
messages, than maybe we wouldn't need a copy of the message but just
references (i.e. links).[1]

Say: You compose and send a message and create an Org mode entry that
says so (Message with subject sent to recipients on).  If you receive
an answer you store a entry saying this (Reply to message X received
from Y on Z).

For this we need a way to maintain the relationship between Org mode
entries and messages so we can jump to messages from within Org and
jump to Org from within the MUA.

I've started to implement something like this for Org's issue tracking
library[2].

The tricky part is that such a mechanism depends on the MUAs
capabilities to interact with Emacs (e.g. WL, Gnus and VM are fine;
mutt might be hacked; Thunderbird? AppleMail?).

HTH,
  -- David

[1] Well, and if we have a reference we could dereference it; say:
Fetch a message and store it as attachment.  This might be as well
helpful for archiving.

[2] http://orgmode.org/worg/org-devel.php#sec-4
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