Re: sending an email to an orgmode file?

[Richard Lawrence <richard.lawrence@berkeley.edu>]

Hi Xebar,

Xebar Saram <zeltakc@gmail.com> writes:

> im looking for a simple solution that will allow me to send an email from
> my mobile phone and habr that email either be appended to a txt(org) file
> or perhaps another solution to get my mobile on the go notes onto my laptop
> orgmode file. i tried orgzly and mobile org but i would prefer a simple
> solution as to send an email
>
> anyone have any thoughts on this?

I'd say a lot depends on the mail setup you use on the machine where
you use Org.  Emacs-based mail clients will be easier to integrate with
Org.  But really you're just limited by how much effort you want to sink
into this, at least if you store your mail in some format that is easy
to read with various tools.

If you use Gnus, one solution (I think?) is Gnorb:

https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/gnorb.html

I don't actually use this or know much about it but other people on this
list can tell you more about it.

In my own setup, I've settled on just making it easy to linking to an
email from a new TODO entry.  This is a very general mechanism that
works well for me, even though it is not completely automatic.  I
describe my setup below.

I use the Emacs interface for notmuch as my mail client.  I integrate it
with Org via org-notmuch and Org capturing.  Basically, I have a key that
automates capturing an email as a TODO item, containing a link to the
relevant mail:

#+BEGIN_SRC elisp
;; in my Org setup:

(require 'org-notmuch)

(setq org-capture-templates
        ; ...
      `(("t" "Task, Note, Project, etc.")
	("tm" "Mail" entry
	 (file ,(concat org-directory "/refile.org"))
	 (file ,(concat org-template-directory "/mail-with-link.txt")))))

;; in my notmuch setup:
  (define-key notmuch-search-mode-map "P"
    (lambda ()
      "postpone message (remove inbox tag, create task to reply)"
      (interactive)
      (notmuch-search-tag '("-inbox" "-unread"))
      (notmuch-search-show-thread)
      (org-capture nil "tm")))
#+END_SRC

The mail-with-link.txt template is simple:

#+BEGIN_SRC org
* %a			:MAIL:
  :PROPERTIES:
  :Entered: %U
  :END:
  %? 
#+END_SRC

I mostly use this to record emails that I need to *reply* to as TODO
items, so a link to the original mail is enough for me.  

This probably isn't quite what you're looking for, but with more effort
on the notmuch side, a setup like this could be used to extract the
content of the email into the Org capture.  And you could also automate
this by looping over the messages that match a certain notmuch query,
etc.  
 
HTH,
Richard