I’m really excited about this as I have been waiting ever since I saw Things enabled this by default when you forward an email.
I figured out how to forward an email into omnifocus on iOS while still retaining the ‘messages’ link.
Omnigroup acknowledged they knew how to do this by default but have said its been on their roadmap for awhile…
So instead this morning it hit me I could do this with zapier!
What I do is have it take a ‘new inbound email’ as input - and then pass it to their create omnifocus task action. The specific part that creates the proper link for the message you are forwarding is “Raw Message ID”.
Once I have that in the notes of the task in zapier - I add “message://” to the front of the output from that email and voila - internal link to the message right on iOS in Omnifocus!
Another note - you cannot change the ‘subject’ of the message it seems otherwise the iOS Mail app dumps that… So instead what I did was added a step to ‘parse’ the *Body Plain" in to two parts. On the first line of the body of the email I set the ‘name of the task’ and then parse (I just chose vxv since it was fast to type). It splits the first part and puts in the name of the task and then the second part is the body that goes into the task following the direct link.
(Just my luck omnigroup will activate this functionality next week - but I’m so happy to finally be able to get a link back directly into omnifocus on iOS (specifically iPhone)!
Lol. And just like that Omni Group has this working now too by default!
One note - as long as you leave the “Fwd:” intact in the subject when you are forwarding the reference link stays intact. But removing the Fwd: in subject makes apple drop that internal reference link.
I tested the Mail app on both Mac and iOS and here’s what I discovered:
On Mail for Mac, I can change the subject to anything I like and the “Referenced message” link is still included in the notes field in OmniFocus.
On Mail for iOS, it seems that I can change the subject name to anything I like as long as I prefix the subject with “Fwd:” (as you noted).
This new Mail Drop functionality is quite significant as it’s now possible to create an OmniFocus action that includes a Mail/message link using Mail on the iPhone. This was previously possible using Mail on the iPad (via Drag and Drop), but no mechanism previously existed on the iPhone.
On a side note, I also experimented with creating a Rule in Mail for Mac that forwards on to my Mail Drop email address based on a word in the subject line. The rule worked, but unfortunately, the “Referenced message” link wasn’t added to the notes field in OmniFocus.
Yes - sorry should have specified iOS is where you need to leave the Fwd: intact.
I also just had a weird thing happen with OmniGroups Implementation where I changed the subject this time on my computer - leaving the FWD intact - but instead of giving me the link to the ‘original’ message - the link it gave me was to my reply instead… So perhaps the mail app does drop the original link and only includes the new one when you change the subject anyways?
I changed my zapier action to just take the first ‘line’ from the body as the task name - and I think I’m going to stick with the zapier implementation because of that.
Regardless - its a game changer for me being able to get links back from my iPhone!
Thanks for sharing your experiences, Andre. It might be worth emailing Omni Group support with this issue. And it sounds like it makes sense to keep the Zapier implementation around…for now at least.
