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GUI - Grand Unified Interface

I'm on a quest for the Grand Unified Interface. I have a detailed hierarchy in the Finder, with a folder for each project, and each project folder parked in the appropriate Active, On Hold, etc. parent folder. A project folder can contain anything from text files, to OmniOutlines, to image files, to FileMaker databases. But the one thing it cannot contain is email. Currently, there is a duplicate project hierarchy in my mailbox list in Mail. During my weekly review, I spend a great deal of time syncing the project data in Mail with the project data in the Finder. I've tried saving copies of email messages into the appropriate project folders in the Finder, but must still keep the originals in Mail in order to facilitate ongoing conversation. I've tried keeping everything in Mail, but that's cumbersome. Email programs are not designed to be GTD managers. I've tried DevonThink, but it doesn't handle email very well, and requires me to launch FileMaker and OmniOutliner in order to work those files. If I'm going to launch independent apps, I might as well use the Finder. I'm looking for a Finder with a tightly integrated email capability. Has anyone run across this holy grail?

dp

dp's picture

Unfortunately, that trick doesn't work...

civitan wrote:
Unfortunately, that trick doesn't work for Mail.app. It works fine for *folders* of messages, though. But then you've still got to duplicate your folder structure in Mail.app.

Thoughts:

1) You could try using Mail Act-On instead of folders, and tags for searching. I tried this for a while, but Spotlight searches just weren't quite instantaneous enough.

2) Any folders you create in Mail are actually stored in ~/Library/Mail/accountname/foldername. So once you've gone through the trouble of creating folders in Mail.app, you can then use Finder aliases to colocate your mail with your files.

3) A synchronization script from Finder to Mail would be pretty simple with AppleScript -- but not trivially simple. So if there's interest in this, let me know and I'll noodle something together.


1) isn't really going where I want to go. My system is so tightly structured that I do very little searching.
2) gets the mail into the project folder, but under cryptic names like "16938.emlx". Not very helpful.
There hasn't been much response to this thread. So the answer to 3) seems to be that only one person is really interested in it, and he's not really able to define what he needs with much precision.

 
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