Mail Drop - beta testing the new email in feature for Omnifocus

Omni Group emailed me the other day asking if I wanted to participate in a beta test of their new Mail Drop feature. This lets you email tasks straight into your OF inbox where they will appear next time any of your devices sync. This feature is the final piece of achieving Inbox 0, even from mobile, all the time, every time.

I've put an extra step in my email processing when I am using either my phone or tablet:

  1. Open mail app
  2. Check first email (all unread emails are emails that need actioning, by it's definition, read emails have been actioned)
  3. Is it crap? Delete it
  4. Can I delegate it? Forward it to the relevant party
  5. Can I action it in less than 2 minutes? Action it.
  6. Do I need to action it but it will take more than 2 minutes? Forward on to my Omnifocus Upload Email, process as part of my inbox processing later.

I wrote back to them saying:

Hi - thanks for letting me use the mail drop feature, I've so far found it to be hugely useful.

Good Immediately useful to help me get to inbox 0 all the time. I check my email on my phone, deal with 2 minute tasks, delete any garbage emails and forward emails that need more than 2 minutes straight to OF. I do not, and never will use the mail drop function for anything other than sending tasks to my inbox for later processing. I can't see the point in being able to mail them straight to a given project or context, too mush to remember!

Bad I'm not sure if this is related and I haven't been able to replicate it, but some tasks I had definitely marked as complete and had 'cleaned up' re appeared as incomplete tasks in my inbox.

Improvements Maintain more formatting from the emails, or make the copy a lot prettier and easier to read when it turns up. When I come to process my inbox, I often need to be able to access the original email that I forwarded onto myself. Any way to build a custom search string that is injected into Mail from a hyperlink in the task created by Mail Drop, would be hugely, hugely useful.

Additional I can see myself emailing tasks straight to my wife using this feature, and her to me. Can you email attachments?

Really appreciate you reaching out to the audience - I'm a big OF fan, have pushed you on many a friend!

thanks

Miles