Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalint...@gmail.com> writes: > On Wed, May 21 2025, Rémi Letot wrote: > >> Christian Moe <m...@christianmoe.com> writes: >> >>> Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalint...@gmail.com> writes: >>> >>> [... 8 lines elided] >>> >>> 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? >> >> I've been using mu4e for a while now, but in my gnus email days I used >> gnorb, and I dearly miss those features in my current workflow... >> >> https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/gnorb.html >> >> Thanks, > > Oh wow! Thanks for mentioning Gnorb. I hadn't heard of it before. (I > started using Emacs after the latest release of Gnorb, it seems.) Going > through Gnorb's manual was interesting to see how one might keep track > of emails via org headlines while keeping them up-to-date automatically. > I wonder if something similar could be done with notmuch...
Hmmm... gnus, notmuch, mu4e, message-mode,... all of these are just emacs interfaces to display (email) messages. I know notmuch only by name, but if it's as configurable as the others, it shouldn't be a problem to add a bit of information to how it displays a list of messages and the current message being read. Now one tricky bit is to get the information to display. mu4e and gnus both have a way to refer to a particular message unequivocally, I guess notmuch has a similar mechanism. That's how one links to a particular message in org. With the recently crafted https://github.com/meedstrom/org-mem it's possible and fast to get a list of org headings which include a particular link. Like, for example, all org headings that link to the current message. Something similar to org-roam's backlinks buffer could be used to show those headings. And somehow a header or hint in the displayed message could be added to show that there are org headings linking to that message, so you know that you can open the backlinks buffer. Or display it automatically if you prefer. If there is only one backlink, you can also simply directly display it as a header in the message view. Then the sky is the limit to what automation one could add :-) Now I can read code and sometimes understand it, but I'm not a developer, so this is all speculation at the moment :-) But now that a global schema is written down, it seems that the hard parts are already done, all that is missing is some glue code between them... and I have missed something like gnorb since I switched to mu4e... I might give it a try... if time permits... so don't hold your breath :-) -- Rémi
