MailTags is handy because it lets you assign due-dates (“tickle dates”) to incoming messages. One problem I’ve got with anything like that, though, is that I’ve already got an inbox for e-stuff in the form of Evernote. It’s possible to forward messages to Evernote for clipping, but I like having a list of actionable messages for a given day in one place, hence the script below.
It goes through my ‘tickler’ mail folder and pulls anything with a tickle date of the current day or earlier, finds Evernote notes tagged with today’s date (I haven’t gotten around to parsing the tags so I can grab earlier notes), and compiles them into a single Evernote note item. I write other to-dos on a printed copy, which gives me a one-stop place to find everything.
One beef: Evernote’s HTML interpreter is sub-par. It doesn’t understand Apple’s message:// URIs, so it’s not possible to dump an Evernote item with hyperlinks to messages as they appear in Mail.app. I’m guessing the way around that might involve importing an HTML file (instead of building a note object and storing HTML in it), but I haven’t bothered testing yet. I just dump plain text into the note for now.
One semi-neat thing is its use of the Mac ‘Summarize’ feature in Applescript. It lets you take something like this article from the AP and render it into a summary:
“President Barack Obama approved adding some 17,000 U.S. troops for the flagging war in Afghanistan, his first significant move to change the course of a conflict that his closest military advisers have warned the United States is not winning.”
The AppleScript syntax for that is just:
summarize "some text" in 1
where “1″ is the number of paragraphs you want back.
In Ruby/appscript, it’s:
osax.summarize("some text")
So when the script goes through the day’s e-mail messages, it passes the message text through the summarizer, which has a better chance of getting me a useful nut than a simple string.slice[0,200] approach (though sometimes it misses in a way that at least provokes some stimulating head-scratching).
One other curiosity in this script. Sometimes native Applescript has to use the ‘using terms from’ convention. MailTags is one such case. It tells Applescript that you’re ‘tell’-ing Mail something, but you need the supplemental dictionary provided by the MailTags add-on. rb-appscript doesn’t allow for that, quite, so you’ve got to do a little dancing around.
#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'appscript'
require 'Date'
include Appscript
require 'osax'
include OSAX
require '/Users/mph/lib/ruby/mailtags.rb'
require 'erb'
today = Date.today.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
title = "Tickler File for #{Date.today.strftime("%A, %B %d")}"
mail = app("Mail", MailTags)
en = app("EverNote")
nb = en.notebooks["tickler"]
ical = app("ical")
note = ""
messages = mail.accounts["Gmail"].mailboxes["tickler"].messages.get
notes = nb.notes.get
todays_notes = []
todays_messages = []
notes.each do |n|
n.tags.get.each do |t|
if t.to_s =~ /##{today}/
todays_notes << n
end
end
end
messages.each do |m|
due_date = m.due_date.get.strftime("%Y-%m-%d")
if due_date >= today
todays_messages << m
end
end
template = <<END
Tickler File for <%= Date.today.strftime("%A, %B %d") %>
Today's Messages
=================================================
<% todays_messages.each do |m| %>
[ ] <%= m.subject.get %> (due <%= m.due_date.get.strftime("%m/%d") %>)
from <%= m.sender.get %> on <%= m.date_sent.get.strftime("%A, %B %d") %>
"<%= osax.summarize(m.content.get).strip %>"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
<% end %>
Today's Notes
=================================================
<% todays_notes.each do |n| %>
[ ] <%= n.title.get %>
<%end %>
END
tickle_text = ERB.new(template).result
tickle_note = en.create_note(:title => title, :notebook => "Inbox", :with_text => tickle_text)
