I have just started with Everdo, and I love it. This is the only important feature that it lacks from my usage so far. I agree 100% with Jordi’s comment above, “I think the best approach is to have an 123456789@everdo.com”. Indeed, this feature is so useful in other programs, like Todoist, Evernote, etc, where I can just forward an email to an address and deal with it later. I get emails all the time that sometimes I have to reply to, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I have to think about, etc; sometimes I read these on my phone sometimes on desktop computer etc. Having these easy to funnel into the same Inbox as my other captured tasks is SOOO useful. I would say it’s a critical feature for any to do app for me, however I like the rest of everdo enough that I’m trying to make do without it.
I have seen a couple comments above about more involved implementations. Evernote and todoist both just give you an email address like add.task.8299124.197618820.e5ae35369fd44205@todoist.net etc., where any email forwarded to this address then goes straight to Inbox. I have seem similar implementations where it is more like username@program.com, where it requires you to register any email addresses you may need ahead of time (presumably to keep random ppl from adding inbox tasks). I prefer the simpler, random character string version, and have never had any issues with it. It’s great because I can send tasks from my work email address or home etc.
Also, I don’t care at all about including attachments etc. I just want to make sure the email doesn’t slip through the cracks. So the title, sender, and body is sufficient.
In Thinking Rock one configures simply an independent email account, which is via pop or imap on startup or regular interval checked and adds emails simply to the web-client with the subject as the header of the task, the email text in the body.
I use this feature the most because how else would one process an email that one receives and which needs attention? Without this feature one has to enter every single email manually. That is not productive at all.
For me this is an important feature.
I don’t see Everdo becoming an efficient tool if one can’t add tasks via email. I am having quite some extra work regarding this. There is no option to use Everdo for bigger projects with many people involved where email is the agreed protocol.
To overcome this limitation I use the Android app. It is the easiest way to collect and process email stuff into Everdo. On Android you can easily open an email and use the share functionality to put things into the everdo inbox.
Even when I do processing at my computer I connect my smartphone to my pc so I can see my smartphone screen and use mouse and keyboard.
I for one and OK with there being no email support. It makes my task list more intentional. The email inbox should be treated as such - an inbox, of things that should be triaged immediately.
SOLUTION1. sending a mail to a @everdo.net is probably not really easy / possible, as it would require some ressources hosted on everdo side (expose a mail server, with one mailbox per user, …) (hence extra costs) + it would then require some sync between centralized server and local one
SOLUTION2. another option could be to have the everdo app itself directly read a mailbox and retrieve some tasks from it : you would need to configure your POP/IMAP informations (gmail, whatever) inside everdo app itself, maybe with a “label” to process, and then everdo (when running) would read the content of that mailbox and retrieve all new mails with the configured label (“process_me” under gmail). Maybe not so easy : labelling mails for example is something quite related to gmail. Everydo developers may also have to handle several use cases / configurations (outlook365, oauth, gmail, …).
SOLUTION3. one alternative would be to stay on the unix philosophy : one tool for one purpose. Hence no changes on everdo side. But feature to be provided in an external way. That could be for example :
you write a small python (or anything else) script that is continuously reading / processing that specific mail account (gmail or whatever)
that program has to be continuously running in the background on your computer (the one in which everdo is running)
the program is all the time reading (every minute, …) that mailbox, and each time there is a new mail (without any need of using labels), it extract the required datas from the mail (maybe with some rules, take subject, take sender, …) and use the everdo API API | Everdo Help to automatically create the corresponding entry in your everdo inbox (maybe with one template in order to be able to inject $subject, $from, $to, $date, … in various places of the created everdo entry).
Really i wonder if that 3rd party solution wouldn’t be the best / simplest for some use cases.
Of course in a corporate environment, it may be inadequate : you may have a firstname.lastname@corp.com mail outlook and a) no possibility to easily have another one and b) it could be forbidden for legal reasons to send mail elsewhere (like gmail, …).
But maybe in a corp environment you may replace that 3rd party (python) script with somelink like Power Automate Office 365 Outlook | Microsoft Power Automate from office 365 (i think it should work quite flawlessly with your main corporate account, for example by processing every mail moved to a specific “process_me/” folder).
Solution 2 was/is used in Thinking Rock without any load or responsibility for the software. I had as described above a specific mail account with pop access and the emails landed in the inbox a new tasks with the subject as the header of the task and the body as the description. Work very well!
This solution works on my phone (Fairmail) only for emails without attachments and inline images. If attachments and inline images are present in the share option Everdo is not shown.
That emails can’t be added easily into Evergreens Inbox is a real drawback and creates a lot of extra work. Every single email that needs follow up I have to enter manually. In Thinking Rock this was so easy! Just a BCC to an email account and then it would pop up in the Inbox of the TR.
uoh… that sucks. I use Nine (https://www.9folders.com/en/index.html) there it works even with mails that have attachments. Hopefully that will not break in a future release.
Personally I don’t like forwarding, because it’s additional clutter in my mailbox.
I understand your discussions and solution 2 or 3 would obviously be the most successful. Things like this exist for Joplin for example. There is also an addon for thunderbird that allows to send emails to Everdo but the project is stopped and I don’t have the skills to adapt it (but it works). Otherwise, the other solution less expensive and already very useful would be to be able to create a description thanks to inline commands (with a good copy/paste game) and/or to be able to paste several lines (for example a mail) in the quick inbox (Ctrl+E) which would insert the first line as a title and the following ones as description. Like on the mobile application in fact.
I still have to go to my sent folder in Fairmail every single time I need to follow up an email, push it via the share function into Everdo inbox, sync the phone and process the evergreen inbox on my PC where I just wrote that very mail.
I have been a decade on Thinking Rock and the email management amongst other features was not only important but saved a ton of time and energy. I am wondering why this topic doesn’t get the attention email has in everybody’s.
Sure a plug-in for Thunderbird would be one solution but in Thinking Rock all the software does is to check an email account and imports the emails into the inbox of the Software. I am not a programmer but is this really so much work?
