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Using Drafts iOS App to add Lists to RTM

kevinhaggard says:
I am always looking for ways to creatively add items to my RTM lists. One of the most frequent apps I use on my iPhone is Drafts by Agile Tortoise software. In the past, I have had to send single items to RTM using Email Actions, but a recent post on Scott'Soapbox (http://scottsoapbox.com/2014/02/26/drafts-recursive-email-actions-for-appigos-todo-app/) about adding to a competing to-do list program with a recursive Drafts action got me thinking I could add a long list of items to RTM from the Drafts app.

If you use the Drafts app, this will make sense, if not, get the app or skip this tip!

Here are the steps I took:

1) Create an Email Action in Drafts - for example, "Grocery", on the To line add your secret RTM email address. Use a predefined subject line of "[[title]]", check off "Send in Background", then in the Template portion, put the list you want, in this example: "L: Grocery" (in Drafts, leave out the quotation marks, just using those to separate the text in this post).

2) Create a URL Action in Drafts - for example, "ToDo Grocery" and add the URL action below:
drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[[title]]&action=Grocery&x-success={{drafts://x-callback-url/create?text=[[body]]&action=ToDo%20Grocery&afterSuccess=Delete&allowEmpty=NO}}

3) Add a list of items you want to add to the list in RTM, in this case, I add a list of items to get at the grocery store.

4) Call the action ToDo Grocery - this then goes through the list you have in Drafts and sends individual emails to your RTM address, adding each of the items to the RTM list you chose in the Email Action in Drafts

Hope this is of help to those of you using Drafts on the iPhone or iPad,
Posted at 3:45am on March 7, 2014
azclaire says:
I use Draft, but I have a much simpler implementation. Can you share how your process improves upon mine? I'm not familiar enough to fully understand your Step 2 coding, so i don't understand what that does for you.

I use the list import to send all the grocery items at once. It looks like your process creates a list then sends each item as an individual item.

I created an Email Action as you do in step 1 for each of my common lists. In this case, "Groceries". My Subject line is "Groceries". I don't need the capital L colon because the default RTM behavior is to consider the subject as the list name.

When I'm ready to add to the list, I open my Draft "Groceries Email Action", type each food item on its own line within the body of the text and hit send. Done.


Posted 10 years ago
kevinhaggard says:
When I tried it your way, using "Grocery" as the list name, then an email body with the contents of the list, then send to my RTM address, I get a task in my default inbox with "Grocery" as the name of the task and a note attached to the task which contains the body of the email.

The way I do it, I end up with a separate task for each item on the grocery list in the list titled "Grocery".

BTW, Step 2 on the coding just recursively takes each item on the list and sends a separate email to my RTM list named with the "L:" function.
Posted 10 years ago
azclaire says:
Ah. We have 2 import email addresses. You are using the one that does NOT have the word "import" in its name.. Using it you will get a task with a note.

If you use the email address that DOES have the word "import" in its name, you will create a list with each line in the email becoming a separate task.

Look at the FAQ on emailing into RTM for more details on how to set it up. Good luck!
Posted 10 years ago
kevinhaggard says:
I always wondered about that second email address - now I know! Your way is much cleaner and although the clever programming was cool (I thought), the implementation of just sending to the "Import" email address is way easier. Thanks for clarifying...
Posted 9 years ago
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