As many of you know from my threads, I have been using Apple Reminders for a long time. I will be so bold as to declare that I doubt anyone is more of a power user of Reminders than I am. I like Reminders, and it can do nearly all I need from a task management app when used to its full potential.
But, and this is a big but (that doesn’t sound quite right! ), I’ve been running into a problem that may force me back to OF, notwithstanding OF’s issues such as slow syncing. The problem I’ve encountered is that Reminders (or it could be Mail) is not holding the correct email link in a task. I frequently send emails to Reminders for follow-up or to add a task originating in an email to a project list in Reminders. This process has worked well for a long time. But it is no longer working reliability. For example, several weeks ago, I emailed my senior team for information to be sent to me no later than today. I added that email to Reminders with a due date of today. When I clicked on the related email link in Reminders this morning to send a final reminder, the email link sent me to an email from January 2023 related to a wallet order! This is happening a lot and has been going on for approximately two months. This is not something I can put up with.
Has anyone else experienced this issue?
I have not decided to move to OF, but as I posted previously, after the release of OF 4, I’ve been running OF and Reminders concurrently.
I found references to this problem going back to 2020. Suggestions included storing your reminders locally if you are using iCloud or storing your reminders in iCloud if you are storing them locally??
I had a similar issue before, which was only happening with certain accounts. Specifically my work accounts which would only allow a 2 week and 1 month sync backwards. My workaround has been to put all my important emails into devonthink (DTTG usually with the touch hold and swipe over method) and then copy the DTTG link to my reminders. This works very well across all iOS/iPad/Mac and has the added benefit of offline copies of emails if needed. Interestingly, since I have done this, it will load the email into DT or DTTG, and there is an option within to then open the original email in the mail app. Even the accounts that were not able to “sync” back far enough would show up when pulled up via this method.
Hope that makes sense (and is a possible option since you already use DT and DTTG).
I’ve had the same experience - it seems to happen when the email I referenced in the reminder is moved from the Inbox into a folder or archived and I try to reference it from an iOS or iPad device. (It generally always works if I’m using another MacOS device.)
I think, in my case, it has to do with whether or not the message has been downloaded to the device.
As someone else mentioned, you can work around it by using DevonThink and making sure it’s synced up between computers. Or just forward it to OmniFocus Maildrop no matter which device you’re on and go about your day.
This is the way! I always found the “mail to” inboxes (OF, Things, Todoist… and mostly everyone else) extremely convenient. Apple being Apple, it’s not so sure they will ever build this feature into Reminders.
I just tried to investigate what @Bmosbacker reported and could not reproduce it, but I don’t have thousands of emails in Mail.app --GMail is another thing.
I see that when adding a Mail to Reminders the task itself displays a small “Mail.app” icon but other fields in the task itself are still empty --I expected to see a mail:// link in the URL–, so this is an opaque Reminders feature and is difficult to diagnose
That is an interesting idea, though does involve several steps for each email. Hmmm… I’ve never quite figured out how to get emails into DT except for drag and drop. I’ll have to give this a try, thanks for the tip. And, as I said above, I’m glad this is not just me with this problem.
That is correct, no link is created in the URL field. I don’t care how Apple does it; I just expect it to work. It does about 80% of the time, but for reasons I don’t understand, for the other 20% I either get an error message or the wrong email brought up. Quite frustrating for someone who has devoted significant time mastering Reminders for use with many projects, including complex ones.
I can only suspect there is something going wrong with your Mail index, perhaps rebuilding the mailbox would help? Given you have 20% of failure rate, it’s easy to check if this solves the problem.
Not for the faint of heart or people who don’t trust their backups
Would doing so destroy the existing mail links in Reminders that ARE working? And, given that I often send emails to Reminders from an iOS device, would the rebuilding update the Mail links in Reminders on iOS devices?
When you say “send emails to Reminders” does that mean you can forward an email and it pops up in Reminders like the Mail to Things feature? I kind of think not but I’m crossing my fingers. That’s what I’m missing in Reminders bs Things.
No, unfortunately, Apple has not created that feature. One can drag and drop an email to Reminders, but that is not how I do it. I select the subject line in Mail and then share to Reminders. This embeds the email in the task with the subject of the email being the task name. Below are screenshots.
Do you have multiple mail accounts? And do those issues only occur with mails from a specific mail account? Did you see any pattern whatsoever for which emails make problems? Does this only happen on iOS?
), I’ve been running into a problem that may force me back to OF, notwithstanding OF’s issues such as slow syncing. The problem I’ve encountered is that Reminders (or it could be Mail) is not holding the correct email link in a task. I frequently send emails to Reminders for follow-up or to add a task originating in an email to a project list in Reminders. This process has worked well for a long time. But it is no longer working reliability. For example, several weeks ago, I emailed my senior team for information to be sent to me no later than today. I added that email to Reminders with a due date of today. When I clicked on the related email link in Reminders this morning to send a final reminder, the email link sent me to an email from January 2023 related to a wallet order! This is happening a lot and has been going on for approximately two months. This is not something I can put up with.
It’s a bug that no one knows out to fix.
