TOPIC: gmail integration (labels and stars)

Hey tr,
Being able to download a list of tasks off an email account is great and a much welcomed addition. However it requires a separate email account that is dedicated to tasks.

Being a remote worker, the majority of my tasks come in the format of email and the process to select and forward each individual email on to another email account to then be downloaded into tr is laborious.

I currently use gmail and labels (or stars) for tasks that will take longer than two minutes to process (it takes one click). After my morning process of email, I then need to select through each email and forward it to another email address to then be downloaded into tr.

Ideally, I would like to configure a label or star (or folder for traditional IMAP) that when TR logs into a email server it knows that it should download off that particular label and then remove the label (or move it to another label).

I currently use ActiveInbox for gmail and processing my email into todo labels is extremely easy, but I then need to move those into TR to get the full functionality of TR's processing.

Does anyone else use gmail and like the idea of importing tasks off a "label" rather than all emails in the inbox?

Thanks

Matt K

I also use Gmail and ActiveInbox - however I don't attempt to merge Gmail into GTD, I just have 2 lists - one on each app.

If you find a nice way to get Gmail flowing into TR then I'm all ears.

+1 on gmail integration. Being able to target specific email (by label in gmail) would be outstanding. This is possible via Imap.

We will look at this this week.

Thought I'd add some detail why this would be such an excellent combo (TR + gmail).

Gmail has three featurse that would make it very easy to send a dedicated portion of one's own e-mail traffic to TR

(1) support for suffixe on e-mail address. In gmail one can append a +suffix to one's e-mail address and it won't affect delivery. I.e. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and [email protected] both end up delivered to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

(2) Filters allow matching the suffix and auto-labeling accordingly. Any email coming at [email protected] can get automatically labeled with a label, such as 'greatidea'.

(3) Labels are presented to imap as folders. External consumers of gmail's imap interface, can request an imap folder and actually get a label. Stuff labeled as 'greatidea' is available in the imap interface to one's gmail account as the greatidea folder of the account. Labels as folders has all the advantage of folders and none of the downsides (putting a label on an e-mail does not preclude other labels).

The effect of these three features: It's super-easy to create a dedicated strand of one's e-mail that could be pulled out via IMAP by an external tool such as TR.

BTW, I'd be happy to donate some coding toward this, but I'm new to the TR eco-system, and don't know how to go about all this. I pulled the SVN 2.x code, but don't know if I start coding in that, whether such code would be integratable into 3.x. The amount of coding effort involved is actually fairly small: addition of a label or folder to the e-mail dialog and ensuring that the e-mail retrieval code can use this label with imap.

Hi, Claire, just wondering how the evaluation of this went?