On Wed, May 21 2025, Christian Moe wrote: > Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalint...@gmail.com> writes: > >> My main problem with trying to use org-agenda for all tasks created from >> emails is that the state and relevance of those emails may change >> without the todos tied to them changing (unless I update it myself). In >> other words, although capturing emails as todos (e.g. create a todo >> which has an org link pointing to a given email) is easy enough, email >> threads develop in a way that makes todos tied to that thread outdated. >> The result is todos which are no longer necessary, todos scheduled for >> dates that have already shifted, and so on. > > I don't have any cure-all workflow for this, but I can think of a > feature that would help facilitate it: e-mail backlinks. I.e., for the > message at point, I want to see at a glance if it has been linked to > from Org-mode agenda files, and to jump at a keystroke to all the places > where those links are found. I mainly want this to remember if I've > already captured a message in a note. But it would also make it easier > to clean up stale TODOs as one goes through one's e-mail threads. > > I just hacked myself a very rough proof-of-concept of such a backlink > feature for the mu4e client. But perhaps someone knows of existing > solutions, and for other clients as well?
That's an interesting approach! I use notmuch instead of mu4e, but perhaps a solution would be to have notmuch be aware of any org todos linked to an email or thread and visually communicate so in the inbox if there is... Maybe such emails would be automatically tagged "REPLIED" or "TODO" depending on some user defined conditions; or the other way around: tagging emails that are linked to org todos can induce a certain effect on the todo, like changing its state or scheduled date. -- Best, Kristoffer
