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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

I tried this as well.

I'm yearning for a tool that lets me drag & drop an email, and it automatically creates a task based on the content. I can obviously go and edit it after setting deadline or assign to project etc.

I was hoping to create this workflow with MS Outlook(on Mac) and its inbuilt Tasks, but apparently they don't support it :-(

I would pay for such a feature.

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I’ve done a non-trivial amount of research around this in connection with office graph and outlook addins. The trick is you need to be able to get back to the original email in its thread from the task, so you can retain context and reply or extend the context as needed while still tracking it as a task. All the implementations I’ve found on the outlook side loose that connection (I think gmail tasks let you retain it but I sadly prefer outlook to gmail)

[Edit to add] almost forgot the key piece, which is that I think it’s possible to retain that context but I haven’t quite been able to justify the time to actually complete the round tripping code.

Things (https://culturedcode.com/things/) does pretty much that. It has a little Quick Entry daemon which lets you press control-option-space in Mail.app to make a new task linked to the selected mail. By default, the subject ends up as the task's title, though you can change it before hitting Return.

In general, I highlight recommend Things. It does all the typical GTD stuff, in a mostly Maclike way, and has a great iOS client.

[Edit: In fact, you can actually drag a mail right into a Things window as well, just as you propose. I never knew that!]

Can you click on a created task in Things and get back to the mail message in the iOS Mail app (as opposed to just seeing a copy of the message as text in the todo app the way most todo apps handle email->task connections)?

Absolutely. The links even resolve on different devices, as long as you have access to the same mail accounts.

Looks like I just blew $10 on this.

The iPad version allows you to create tasks truly linked to emails but the iPhone version doesnt let you create them you can only open them (from what I can find, hopefully I’m wrong as I’ve been looking for this feature for YEARS and would love to make this app home)

I use a variation on inbox-zero: if it's unread, it still has to be dealt with. Sort email unread-first. Works well enough for me (I have lots of "automatically mark read" filters for noise emails).

I recently came across https://www.moo.do. Might be what you're after.

Wow, this is revelation, thank you, very cool tool with a lot of integrations. Need to give it a whirl, but looks very promising.

Don’t kno about Mac but: https://www.google.com/search?q=outlook+task+from+email&ie=U...

Yes, my manager who uses a Windows laptop teases me with it. I'm using a Mac and am left out.

I don't know how configurable outlook is, but Taskwarrior itself is pretty easy to automate.

I use mu4e for email and have configured it so that pressing the "t" key when viewing an email creates a Taskwarrior task.

I use the email-to-board feature of Trello and just include the address as a BCC when replying to clients, or just forward it if I'm not replying. Everything goes into the "Incoming" column which I can then prioritize. Works great for me.

In Asana, you can forward emails to x@mail.asana.com and it will create a task for you. The headline is the title of the task and the body is the description.

Outlook/OneNote combo works well for this.

iOS11 has drag-and-drop between apps, including todo apps. Bonus 4:3 screen on iPad Pro.

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