How to integrate email & MLO?

[DavidH]

I was trying out Thinking Rock this weekend on my Linux desktop.
Mostly I found it very clunky (and it would occasionally crash) but it
did have one feature that I liked a lot.

In Thinking Rock you can download email from an account into the
equivalent of an inbox for processing. I found this very useful for
processing incoming support requests that arrive by email from the
trac system.

Has anyone a trick up their sleeve for reproducing this functionality
using MLO? Preferably not on a Windows OS.

Thanks

David

[NiMhurchu]

So this would be incoming email being imported into the inbox.
But what about outgoing email?
Often, I write an email which belongs to a task. The result is an
email in my sent items and a task in the outline, both unlinked from
each other.
I would like to see a feature in MLO which allows to write an email
based on the current task.
E. g. the task "Have James review the specification document" could
have an email button which fires up a new email window with the
specification document as attachment and the tasks details as body and
sets the task as @Waiting for

[Ted Penner]

I'd like to see either direction.  Right now mlo doesn't support email to or email from mlo

[DavidH]

You can delegate tasks in Thinking Rock to an email address with a
follow-up date. However for me it was the arrival of 'tasks' (in this
case support requests) directly into Thinking Rock that impressed me.
To use MLO in this way I've got to:

1. Copy / Paste the email subject into MLO task name

2. Copy / Paste the email body into the MLO task notes.

If there's an easier way of doing this then I'd be delighted to hear
it. As emails are the source of so much of what we do today (well for
those of us bound to our computers) then Surely someone must have
found a way of improving this process.

David

[HHumbert]

If you use Outlook, you can use the following macro to put a hypertext
link into your MLO tasks. If you use Outlook with Zimbra (as opposed
to Exchange), it'll keep the same OID, even if you move the message or
delete it. Tres helpful:

Rem
Rem Stolen from http://mutable.net/blog/archive/2006/09/02/how_to_hyperlink_to_microsoft_outlook_messages.aspx
Rem

Sub pet_CopyItemIDs()
Dim myOLApp As Application
Dim myNameSpace As NameSpace
Dim currentMessage As MailItem
Dim ClipBoard As String
Dim DataO As DataObject

' Housekeeping: set up the macro environment
Set myOLApp = CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
Set myNameSpace = myOLApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")

' Figure out if the active window is a list of messages or one
message
' in its own window
' On Error GoTo QuitIfError ' But if there's a problem, skip it
Select Case myOLApp.ActiveWindow.Class
' The active window is a list of messages (folder); this means
there
' might be several selected messages
Case olExplorer
' build the clipboard string
For Each currentMessage In
myOLApp.ActiveExplorer.Selection
ClipBoard = GetMsgDetails(currentMessage, ClipBoard)
Next

' The active window is a message window, meaning there will
only
' be one selected message (the one in this window)
Case olInspector
' build the clipboard string
ClipBoard = GetMsgDetails
(myOLApp.ActiveInspector.CurrentItem, _
ClipBoard)
' can't handle any other kind of window; anything else will be
ignored
End Select

QuitIfError: ' Come here if there was some kind of problem
Set myOLApp = Nothing
Set myNameSpace = Nothing
Set currentMessage = Nothing

Set DataO = New DataObject
DataO.Clear
DataO.SetText ClipBoard
DataO.PutInClipboard

Set DataO = Nothing

End Sub

Function GetMsgDetails(Item As MailItem, Details As String) As String

If Details <> "" Then
Details = Details + vbCrLf
End If
Details = Details + "Date: " + CStr(Item.SentOn) + vbCrLf
Details = Details + "Subject: " + Item.Subject + vbCrLf
Details = Details + "Sent by: " + Item.SenderName + vbCrLf
Details = Details + "To: " + Item.To + vbCrLf
Details = Details + "Outlook:" + Item.EntryID + vbCrLf + vbCrLf

GetMsgDetails = Details

End Function

[pottster]

Excellent, thanks very much for sharing. Particularly useful in
working with selection of multiple items. :)

On Aug 19, 5:11 am, HHumbert <peto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you use Outlook, you can use the following macro to put a hypertext
> link into your MLO tasks.  If you use Outlook with Zimbra (as opposed
> to Exchange), it'll keep the same OID, even if you move the message or
> delete it.  Tres helpful:
>
> Rem

> Rem Stolen fromhttp://mutable.net/blog/archive/2006/09/02/how_to_hyperlink_to_micros...

[David Jade]

What I'd really like to see is a COM API for MLO that could be used to
programatically insert a task into the MLO inbox. This way an Outlook
add-in could be written (which I'd gladly write) where you could click
one button in Outlook and both flag a message and have it sent to MLO
along with the "outlook:" message hyperlink. You could also link the
Oulook message back to a MLO task (i.e. attaching a mlo:// task url to
the message) so you could bring up the task from within Outlook as
well. Furthermore, with a rich enough API this add-in could also track
flagged mail items and update the tasks in MLO when messages are
replied to, deleted, or moved (i.e. when OLID's change), etc...

None of this is really possible without an API for MLO, especially the
task/OLID tracking as that requires both retrieving task data from MLO
and updating exsiting MLO tasks. At one time I did some of this in a
Outlook macro using automation (I also wrote the above OLID code, btw)
but it is severely crippled without a MLO COM API that allows for
creating new tasks and updating existing tasks.

I've suggested this as a feature some time ago but I've never heard
any mention of whether it was being considered. Hopefully it will
someday...

david

[Broto]

Great idea. Would be *hugely* helpful.

I've used the application Zoot before that used to integrate well with
outlook, and provided advanced text operations that I used to
automatically attach categories/contexts to the messages. David's
idea could open up this possibility.

[NiMhurchu]

Can't you just drag and drop them there?
At work, I am using Outlook 2003, it works.
At home, with Thunderbird, it doesn't. But it's not too necessary
there.

On 19 Aug., 06:11, HHumbert <peto...@gmail.com> wrote:
> If you use Outlook, you can use the following macro to put a hypertext
> link into your MLO tasks.  If you use Outlook with Zimbra (as opposed
> to Exchange), it'll keep the same OID, even if you move the message or
> delete it.  Tres helpful:
>
> Rem

> Rem Stolen fromhttp://mutable.net/blog/archive/2006/09/02/how_to_hyperlink_to_micros...

[DavidH]

I'm using Thunderbird and MLO running under Wine on a Linux system so
drag and drop is a non-starter as is COM integration.

[David Jade]

Drag and drop from Outlook to MLO does creates an "outlook:" style
hyperlink to the message. However if you're using Exchange and you
move the Outlook message to another folder, that hyperlink will then
be broken as the message ID changes. I'd like to see a way to preserve
this which could be done in an Outlook add-in that updated the MLO
task when something on the message changes. I'd also like to see a way
to link the MLO task back to the Outlook message. Then all sorts of
things are possible, like checking the MLO task when the Outlook
message flag was checked or the messages was replied to, etc..

david