Forums / Tips & Tricks

eddm

I'm pretty sure the bang is also used with bash too, so look out for that.

This could be pretty useful if combined with an Automator action on OS X. Bring up a quick text prompt, feed the input as arguments to the mail binary. Nice and lightweight - I like it :)

In fact, the same approach could be used with an Automator Service in Snow Leopard, thanks to Apple's new improvements to that area. Highlight text (perhaps in an email), right click it, "Add to RTM", feed THAT text into the mail command.

You've inspired me here, I might use my free weekend to play about and see if I can put together an elegant enough solution that way. (Until someone else tells me they've already done it)

Posted 2 years ago

eddm

Expanding on that, it is incredibly easy to turn into a very easy to use Automator Service in Snow Leopard (Mac OS 10.6).

Using this, you can right click any text and just select "Send to RTM" (or whatever you want to name it) to create it as a task in RTM (probably in your inbox, for you to prioritise and categorise later in a shallow GTD way).

Just fire up Automator, create a "Service" and ensure the drop down at the top reads "Service receives select TEXT in ANY APPLICATION".

Look under the "Utilities" action library and drag a "Run shell script" action into your workflow on the right. Use the bash shell (/bin/bash); it'll probably work just as well with the others, assuming you haven't customised the others to make this not work.

Change "pass input" to "as arguments", and paste the following into the textbox below:

mail -s "$1" username+abc123@rmilk.com

Replacing the email address with yours, obviously, that can be found in the "Info" tab on your settings page.

That $1 basically represents the first argument passed into your shell script here, which is going to be the text you've selected.

Save this service, call it whatever you want (this name will be what appears in your context (right click) menu or services menu) and -- assuming your settings at the top were correct, specifying that you are taking TEXT input from ANY application -- you should see this option when you right click any highlighted text. Hit that option, and you should see that text as a new task in RTM in a matter of seconds.

This is an incredibly simply action, but I'm sure will be very useful to me and everyone else. As stated in the OP, you MUST have a mail delivery daemon running on your machine; which it is by default on OS X. Chances are if you're turned it off, you know how to turn it on.

Passing this text in as an argument to the mail command will also negate the need to escape possible control characters such as the bang (!), so feel free to use whatever text you want in creating tasks this way.

Props to manning999 for alerting me to the simplicity of just using the mail command to throw these things into RTM :)

Posted 2 years ago

manning999 and eddm,

Both of your tips are very cool, so you're both Tips & Tricks Tuesday winners -- we've upgraded each of your RTM accounts to have a free year of Pro. :)

Posted 1 year ago

manning999

Sweet! Thanks!

Posted 1 year ago

For the email it via the command line, it might be worth adding email aliases (/etc/aliases) to forward to your RTM email address via easier to remember local email addresses, i.e. if you are using a traditional mail transport agent (such as sendmail or postfix) insert into /etc/aliases file:

########### /etc/aliases ##########
rtm-task: fred+ab123@rmilk.com
rtm-task-list: fred+ab123+import@rmilk.com
##############################

(and then issue the 'newaliases' command as route)

Then your command line becomes the slightly easier to remember:

mail -s "Test code changes committed by Bart. ^tom @ 9a \!1 #Testing #na @Work" rtm-task

Or for a list of tasks:

mail -s "Inbox" rtm-task-list << EOFTASKS
Test code changes committed by Bart. ^tom @ 9a \!1 #Testing #na @Work
Review specification updates from Barney ^thurs \!2 #specs @Work
<< EOFTASKS

(or you can keep track of tasks to add in a text file in a similar way, and send that instead of using a 'here' document)

mail -s "Inbox" < task-list.txt

(where task-list.txt contains the same content as the above 'here' document)

Posted 1 year ago

Bother. That second '<<'' should of course not be there -- should be just a naked 'EOFTASKS'

Posted 1 year ago

I use the manning999 tip, but with a little improvement.

I created a small shell function which makes tasks adding from a shell easier.

Just edit your profile file (with Mac OS X it's ~/.bash_profile) and add these lines :

rtm() {
echo '' | mail -s "$*" homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com
}

So after opening a new shell you can type :

rtm Test code changes committed by Bart. ^tom @ 9a \!1 \#Testing \#na @Work

[Note the bashslashes before the ! and # characters.]

And Homer will be happy to see the task added to his list.

Posted 1 year ago

kylesteinman

Can anyone tell the Unix-unsavvy and Automator relatively-unsavvy amongst us if there is a way to add to the Service a request for which day to put it on? (so that it can ask "What day?") and I can choose "today" or "tomorrow" or "Saturday" and it will add that to the end of the Subject line for the mail so that it gets put on that day?

Thanks!

Posted 1 year ago

Tried using the automator tip but doesn't work. :(

I have mail running as a process.

Posted 1 year ago

babouyes

Hi there, I use Quicksilver to add tasks on mac, but what about windows(7). is there anything like that?

thank you!

Posted 1 year ago

For those who dont have a mail server to push to, use msmtp (http://msmtp.sourceforge.net/) instead of mail to push directly to rmilk's smtp server !

pretty simple to install on Linux, just do a apt-get or yum ! Any one can chime in if msmtp is available for Macs ?

msmtp along with host:
msmtp -X - -f '<>' --host=$(host -t MX rmilk.com | sort -n -k 6 | cut -d' ' -f 7 | head -n 1) homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com

msmtp along with dig:
msmtp -X - -f '<>' --host=$(dig rmilk.com MX +short | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f 2 | head -n 1) homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com

Input methods of your tasks in your shell -

msmtp -X - -f '<>' --host=$(dig rmilk.com MX +short | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f 2 | head -n 1) homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com
Test code changes committed by Bart. ^tom @ 9a \!1 #Testing #na @Work
Review specification updates from Barney ^thurs \!2 #specs @Work
and are key board commands

echo "my new task" | msmtp -X - -f '<>' --host=$(dig rmilk.com MX +short | sort -n | cut -d' ' -f 2 | head -n 1) homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com

Note that there is no queuing, so it will either succeed or fail in realtime

you would see this when a successful message is sent -
Mon DD HH:MM:SS host=smtp-in01.l.rememberthemilk.com. tls=off auth=off from=<> recipients=homersimpson+abc123@rmilk.com mailsize=35 smtpstatus=250 smtpmsg='250 2.0.0 Ok: queued as xxxxxxxxxx' exitcode=EX_OK

Posted 1 year ago

joel.remigio

Tthis morning I implemented the Automator tip successfully. But now, my custom "Send to RTM" is no longer turning up in my right-click context menu.

Any thoughts?

Posted 1 year ago

@manning999 & @eddm

Two fantastic tips!

Would either of you object to me re-posting these tips on my personal blog, with full credit and links of course?

My blog can be found here: www.johnwin.co.uk

Please let me know.

Posted 1 year ago

I totally agree. These are excellent tips as I am constantly looking for ways to speed up adding tasks.

Thanks for sharing!

Posted 1 year ago

manning999

I personally have no objections. Blog away!

Posted 1 year ago

jdfalk

I've been playing with email in these same ways since about 1992, but I chose a different route for my command-line script because I wanted it to be closer to real-time:

---
#!/bin/bash

# Login information.
USERNAME="myusername"
PASSWORD="mypassword"
DMTO="rtm"
URL=http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml
CURL=/usr/bin/curl

$CURL -u $USERNAME:$PASSWORD -d status="d $DMTO $*" $URL
---

Posted 1 year ago

jdfalk

(that's your twitter username & password, BTW)

Posted 1 year ago

tipclapper

Hey guys,

I just finished a little AppleScript app, which simply opens a dialog window, where I can enter my task name and stuff... I run it through quicksilver by typing "milk"...

To send the mail, I use the code above. But there is a issue with german umlauts.

For example: I have a list which is called "Bücher" (means books in english), which contains books I may want to buy.

When I send a mail like:
mail -s "myGreatBook #Bücher" adress@rmilk.com

the task will be displayed in the inbox list and has the tag bxxcher...

Can anyone help?

Thanks for sharing anyway!!!

Posted 1 year ago

janvanderploeg

I've tried the automator script. Didn't worked on my default MBP with default OSX 10.6. No failure message, no task in my rtm inbox.

Posted 1 year ago

@jdfalk

how exactly this should work?

Posted 1 year ago

janvanderploeg +1

pls help! I'm afraid there is no mail delivery daemon running on my mac (exc 'Mail') ... thanks in advance

Posted 1 year ago

danwtmoon

@janvanderploeg +1

Posted 1 year ago

@janvanderploeg +1

but I do think that we have a mail daemon running.. just open terminal and type "mail" - at least I got a "no mail for myuser" back... so I guess you just have to set it up somehow.

Posted 1 year ago

Here's how to set up your daemon running with gmail: http://www.riverturn.com/blog/?p=239

Can anyone help, when sending tasks from a console, the letters ä and ö are replaced with X-letters. When I send mail to i.e. gmail, they're ok. I've tried to change the encoding to utf-8 and iso-8859-1 with no luck...

Posted 7 months ago