Re: Collaborative Team Project Management with Orgmode?

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:

> Eric Abrahamsen writes:
>
>> The following message is a courtesy copy of an article
>> that has been posted to gmane.emacs.orgmode as well.
>>
>> John Kitchin <jkitchin@andrew.cmu.edu> writes:
>>
>>>>
>>>> Let's see... the org-contacts vs BBDB issue isn't a big deal, since
>>>> Gnorb doesn't actually do all that much with contacts right now. I'd be
>>>> happy to add tweaks to it to make it more org-contacts friendly.
>>>>
>>>> Email tracking is a bigger issue. Gnorb uses the Gnus registry to track
>>>> correspondences between messages and headlines, and obviously none of
>>>> that would work with mu4e.
>>>>
>>>> Earlier versions did tracking by storing message ids as a property on a
>>>> headline. I suppose I could go back to doing that in a mu4e-specific
>>>> library.
>>>
>>> Message id tracking is likely the way to do it in mu4e. mu4e links seem
>>> to store this for links.
>>>
>>> [[mu4e:msgid:BN3PR0301MB0851DB3E4C53993DAA1E8A98B2610@BN3PR0301MB0851.namprd03.prod.outlook.com]]
>>
>> Yup, I think most of the MUA links end up looking something like that.
>> Message IDs are the one constant across MUAs and (most) mail sources, so
>> everything in Gnorb is keyed to that.
>
> It is pretty easy to get these from a message. I use this variable in a
> send callback function:
>
> (setq *email-message-id*
>         (concat
>          "mu4e:msgid:"
>          ;; borrowed from https://github.com/girzel/gnorb/blob/master/gnorb-utils.el#L137
>          (replace-regexp-in-string
>           "\\(\\`<\\|>\\'\\)" "" (mail-fetch-field "Message-ID"))))
>
> and then later use
> (org-set-property "Message-ID" *email-message-id*)
>
> and I get a clickable link in the property that will go back to the
> message (after mu indexes again for freshly sent emails).

[...]

> This seems to do what you describe. When I run it, I get an mu4e buffer
> with those two messages in it. Basically you just create a mu query.
>
> #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
> (let ((ids '("871teq3c9p.fsf@ericabrahamsen.net"
>              "201508260407.t7Q479lS026871@relay.andrew.cmu.edu") ))
>   (mu4e-headers-search
>    (mapconcat
>     (lambda (id)
>       (concat "msgid:" id))
>     ids
>     " or ")))
> #+END_SRC

All this looks very encouraging!

>>>> Another thing I find hugely useful is automatically transferring files
>>>> attached to incoming messages to Org headings (via org-attach).
>>>> Presumably mu4e has a way of getting at the attachments on a message, so
>>>> in theory this wouldn't be that hard, either.
>>>
>>> This sounds pretty interesting. I have never gotten that into
>>> attachments, but this might change my mind. There are functions in mu4e
>>> to view and save attachments, so this might not be hard.
>>
>> Much of my work involves throwing attachments around (or rather,
>> receiving attachments and sending back plain text whenever possible),
>> so this is pretty crucial for me. While org-attach is very sound, I
>> found its surface-layer interface a bit cumbersome, and this makes it a
>> lot easier to use.
>
> Me too ;) I just have not progressed to org-attach yet. I usually have
> to edit the attachments. How easy is it to reattach them to send back?

When you use `gnorb-org-handle-mail' on a heading, that composes a new
reply to most recently-associated message (or does something else,
depending), and runs `map-y-or-n-p' over the org-attach files, offering
to attach them to the outgoing message.

This works pretty well for me. The only org-attach commands I'm really
missing now would be `org-attach-copy-attachment' (to somewhere else on
my filesystem), and `org-attach-refile-attachment' (to move an
attachment to a different heading).

Anyway, all looks promising! Now to find the time...

Eric