Why do people want to send email to Agenda?

Talk
1

I’m intrigued by a recent poll we did for features in Agenda. One that scored quite highly was the ability to email notes to Agenda.

I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m wondering why someone would want to do it.

If you are such a person, what is the motivation?

Does that email act as an easy inbox so you don’t have to go searching for the Agenda app to get something in quickly?

Does that mean you can make notes from other platforms, like Windows?

Does that mean you can easily forward existing emails to turn them into notes?

Genuinely interested. Let me know your views.

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I work on a company-issued Windows computer, so being able to add things to Agenda requires switching devices. This can be annoying if it’s just a small, quick reminder to myself about something not work-related. There are also things I receive in my email at work that I might want or need in Agenda, like things related to my benefits or training and licensing info / deadlines.

Currently, I just email to my personal email and then put it into Agenda from there, requiring me to handle things multiple times to get it into Agenda.

3

It’s a bit old school but a feature still supported by some apps. I don’t think I’ve ever used the feature but I get it. It is I think a bit of a niche market. Example:

DEVONthink is a place for all types of documents, including emails. With the Pro or Server edition, you can archive emails and send documents directly from your database. In DEVONthink 4, we’ve now improved email importing capabilities to overcome limitations caused by Apple’s discontinuation of Mail plugins. Additionally, you can now archive attachments more conveniently and there are new options for automated email sending.

OmniFocus supports it as well.

4

I get the Windows issue. Seems logical.

When you want to import mail into Agenda, do you expect an exact version of the email, or just the text or simpler version? Some apps archive content to give an exact HTML web archive or PDF. Is that what you would expect, or that Agenda just does it’s best to import a basic version of the email.

There is quite a difference between Agenda and apps like DEVONthink and Evernote, which are like places you just throw content for later search. Agenda has more structure, and doesn’t work as well for accumulating lots of data like that.

5

I’d be fine with a pretty basic text version of the email itself, but, the big thing for me with emails is attachments. If I could pull in the text of the email along with any attachments as attachments to the note, that would be fantastic. I get a lot of emails from my kids’ school or their coaches with screenshots or PDF’s that I need to reference on a future date.

1 Like
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I also see this as the main use case for a direct communication channel between the Windows or Linux environment and Agenda.
In some cases, this would reduce the number of steps actually required.
This feature is particularly useful on the iPhone, where copying the contents of an email into Agenda is somewhat more cumbersome.

It would also be an advantage for me to receive a note containing the text along with the email attachments. The text could also be in Markdown format.

It would also be great to use special commands that can be sent to Agenda either at the end of the subject line or at the very bottom of the email.
I’m thinking of Agenda’s text actions.
E.g. automatically assigning a reminder to the note, or adding a relevant tag, person, date, or adding this note to the relevant project, etc.
Evernote can do something similar, but Agenda can do much, much more thanks to its text actions.
That would be a very powerful feature.

7

That makes sense, thanks.

The idea of text actions in the subject or body is an interesting one. A command at the bottom of the email to assign a project, tag, or reminder could be quite powerful.

One thing that is tricky for us: because Agenda is local-first and doesn’t store data on our servers, we can’t easily accept an email directly. It would likely need to go through some intermediary. We are thinking about how best to handle that.

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Another advocate here…obviously within real world project work, email correspondence/communications can be key to tracking progress / updates. Today we have to manually copy / paste the text within the email to a note, then manually open attachments and use the share function to get it into Agenda, and then select the appropriate note that you just pasted the context from the email into. Multiple steps required vs “forward to agenda” or even take a note from Outlook | OneNote workflow and have a “send to Agenda” option/add-on within Outlook to keep it local and avoid needing the intermediary.

9

Thanks, that’s useful. The Outlook add-on idea is interesting too. We’ll keep thinking about how best to handle this without adding a server dependency.