Which E-Mail App do you use with Agenda

Hi community,
I’m a new agenda user and I’m enjoying the app very much. However, sending an email link from my mail app to an Agenda note doesn’t work with my Spark email app. So my questions are

  1. Is there a workaround for sending an email link from Spark to an Agenda note?

  2. Is there an alternative email app (for a reasonable price) that can send email links to Agenda notes?

  3. How do you reference emails in your Agenda notes?

Thanks in advance and stay healthy.

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Provided you are using iOS/iPadOS as your main device:

  1. I don’t use Spark, but if you are on an iPad, you can drag and drop and email from Apple Mail to Agenda and it will generate the link. Have not found a way to do that from the iPhone yet.
  2. I gave up and only use Apple Mail for now.
  3. Most emails I just copy paste to Agenda. I found it is better for me since Agenda’s strengths is providing me context of a project. I find linking to other apps and jumping between them and Agenda counter productive for me.
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The only email app (and Ive tried a few - Spike, Canary, Outlook, Hey, Newton, Edison, Spark to name some) that has direct integration with Agenda as of now is Airmail. None of the others do as of now, though I understand there has been some communication between Agenda devs and Spark team.

That said, there are also other options, depending on what you need exactly. I mostly use Spark and can:
A) integrate spark directly with reminders to forward emails to a dedicated list in the reminders app. This then pops up in agenda and can be set to any date you want. You can even then make a note out of it and add it to “On the Agenda”
B) If you want the full email, from Spark you can just choose the email you want to export, click on the “…” (3 dots at bottom right of email to open options). From there you choose “Open In”, and select Agenda. You can choose which project to put it in, open a new note, whatever you prefer, and it will export the full email there. You can connect it to a reminder or event as well from there

Its not necessarily direct, 1-click integration in Spark, and it could be better, but it does work quite well. Airmail is actually a direct 1-click, so that may be a better choice if thats important.

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I use MailMate which has a “copy link to email” function, and paste the link right into Agenda. It’s not a special link though - if I had Mail.app as my default email client, those same links would open the emails in Mail instead. Here’s an applescript which copies a link for the current email, you might try that.

Another possibility is Hook, I’m not sure how it handles email links - whether it produces a message:// link like MailMate, or its own hook:// protocol.

Those options are all MacOS only. That works for me since when I’m using iOS I just move emails into an actions folder and then process it on MacOS later.

I use Spark and “integrate” email into my Agenda workflow in various ways:

First, I use the snooze function in Spark to be reminded if someone I need a response from hasn’t got back to me - the email re-appears in my inbox at the date I’ve set. Although this is purely in Spark, I think of it as ‘integration’ because it avoids the need to create a note and/or reminder anywhere else. Less friction.

Second, I copy the Spark email link into a relevant Note - especially for a long email thread which I will need to refer to when working on a Project. However, it’s very annoying that the link opens the thread in a browser, and shows the thread at the time the link was created - so later emails are included.

Third, If I have a Note which is preparation for a meeting, I will often copy relevant bits of an email into it - to remind me of the key points we’ve already discussed etc. This might be a couple of sentences or paragraphs. In this context, in note is better than jumping to the actual email, as I can just include the relevant bits of text.

Fourth, If I’m writing a note about my interactions with a particular person, I often just refer to the emails and rely on search to find them later. I’ll write “emailed \date” to both have a record that I did email them, and to make it easier to find. Again, in this case I dont need the email in the note, and this is faster and reduces friction. Also, if I ever do search for the email, I will see any subsequent emails in the search.

I suppose I saying that in some cases actual integration may be overrated, and a simple workflow of which Agenda is part, may be more useful.

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Thanks to everybody for your tips. I’ll check which of the suggested workflows will fit my needs best.

Best regards

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Hey’s share works really great and if you share to Agenda, it actually creates a link to said email. How did you try and it didn’t work?

Hi @Roland_Leth,
I adopted this workflow from @trebso:

I copy the Spark email link into a relevant Note - especially for a long email thread which I will need to refer to when working on a Project. However, it’s very annoying that the link opens the thread in a browser, and shows the thread.

And if I don’t need the complete Thread/E-Mail I copy relevant bits of the E-Mail in my meeting note.

I love the modern take on email by Hey, and I wanted this to work but it just didn’t for me. My job comes with a fair amount of stress and at a high pace - where I regularly need to go back and reference old emails, search for previous information, sometimes several months old.
Since Hey only seems to forward new messages over, Id lose that ability for all old emails.

I also was never able to find an option to share with Agenda. The Agenda app just wasn’t an option on the share sheet in iPad OS for me - maybe I was doing something wrong with that?

True, just realized it links the whole thread; doesn’t seem like you can link a specific message, meaning it’ll open “the latest message”.

Not sure what to say about this, Agenda is there for me, in the share sheet :thinking:

Have you enabled it as shown here? Sharing, Import, Export, and Printing

Yeah, I did try that - the strange thing was the Agenda app wasn’t showing as an option even when I scrolled all the way to the right and clicked “more”. Which is strange cuz I don’t have that problem with any of the other apps I use on a regular basis with Agenda (Drafts, Safari, etc). I assume this is just me then somehow?

Sometimes it helps to reboot the device, have you tried that?

Thanks for the tip - thats something I hadnt done. To be honest though, Ive deleted the Hey! App and Im sticking with Spark for now - it still seems to be the best for my needs with Airmail up there as well. A lot of my work gets done by email so having a strong email app with integration to my daily workflow apps is critical.

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I enjoy Spark but recently quit using it because of the changes to the payment plan–subscription fatigue. I don’t have a problem with subscriptions in general, but they, like newsletters, tend to grow over time. So I make decisions about which one where the juice is worth the squeeze. For the moment, I’ve gone back to Apple Mail.

While Apple Mail doesn’t really integrate, I can drag the e-mail from it to Agenda so that I get a backlink to the original e-mail.

It would be terrific if someone would build a business of making Apple app plug-ins similar to the very limited example of iOXperts and their tools for Daylite. They have great plug-ins and a great plug-in manager. While they are also a subscription–thus subject to my habit of reviewing and elimination–they have been worth the squeeze when I use Daylite.

Tried them all. Now I use Airmail on all devices!