Email sharing behavior - Airmail to Goodtask

My primary way of adding tasks to Goodtask is by sharing an email from Airmail to it using the share dialog in iOS. What I generally get then is a task titled the subject of the email, with the link taking me back to the original email in Airmail. (This is great in helping maintain inbox zero, btw.)

The typical looks like this:

You can see the task title and the Airmail link.

However sometimes, and without rhyme or reason, what happens instead with the same process is that the full text of the email goes into the task title and the link picks up some url from the copy in the email. Example:

In this example, it picks up the link from the signature of the sender rather than the link to the email in Airmail. This does not happen every time there is a link in the email. I haven't been able to discern a pattern.

Any ideas?

Thanks for the feedback Mike. I'm not using Airmail so I'm not sure how they share email but I'll tell you how GoodTask handles it. When there is no specific data in URL field, GoodTask searches title and then notes field for any URLs. If there is any, it's shown on URL field to easily open it. (Used on Quick Action too)

Currently it gets the first URL so I assume those latter ones have URL that's fetched before airmail URL scheme.

I'll keep your feedback as something like 'Use last URL searched' on the list to consider. Would this resolve the issue?

I'm not positive it solves. Would an option be to have an options toggle to always favor on-device app URLs?

What’s the details on sharing with Airmail?

Do they add title and link all in title field? If it does, don’t they have a pattern?

Here's the share dialogue I get for the email alert of your reply.

That nets this:

With this copy in the title in GoodTask:

[GoodTask Forum] [Feedback] Email sharing behavior - Airmail to
Goodtask
goodtaskJanuary 13

What’s the details on sharing with Airmail?

Do they add title and link all in title field? If it does, don’t they have a pattern?

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Note that the example above performs as expected. In a perfect world, I'd rather the subject line be the title and the email body go to notes (which come to think of it, would likely solve the original problem).

BUT with many emails, the link does not go to the airmail app but to a website linked in the body of the email. The big culprit seems to be email signatures that feature URLs.

Like:

I've tested Airmail and if you use 'Share' menu, it adds title, text and url scheme all in one text which goes to the title of a task. On this case, using last url should resolve the issue (Of course it's not an option yet but just saying).

It seems like Airmail also has an action 'Send to Reminder' which simply adds title and url link on notes field. This could be an alternate way to keep email related task going.

Thank you -- and above and beyond of you to go try Airmail. :slight_smile:

The last URL method sounds like a winner...

Ahh- I see what you mean on Send to Reminder. That could have been the solution, save that it puts the date and time the email was sent into the "due" field.

Hey! Just wanted to add a Shortcut I made to do this exact thing by using Airmail's Custom Actions.

  • In Airmail, create Custom Action to Run Workflow "Airmail to GoodTasks"
  • Enable "Sender", "Sender Name", "To", "Subject", "Simplified Text", and "Message Link"
  • Set Separator to "||"

The Shortcut will ask you to add your Reminders List names, but will give you the ability to choose List and Due Date, and keep the url to link to the Airmail message. I don't have the full message text passing through to the reminder, just the Subject and an "#email" tag which I use for smart lists.

Hope you enjoy!

https://www.icloud.com/shortcuts/a449766777574d86bad2dab72ab90fb0

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Good idea... Doesn't fit my use case, but is an inspiration to try to roll my own...

Hi, this looks really useful but when I tried it I got the following error message. Any ideas?

"Numerical argument out of domain
The index you specified was outside of the possible range (you asked for item 7, and the list has only 6)"

I finally wound up switching email client to Spark, which has a share to Apple Reminders option, which obviously syncs with Goodtask.