Simply send an email to your mail drop email address from any device and it will end up in your OmniFocus inbox. The subject of the email becomes the title of the action and the body of the email is added to the note field. If you use the Omni Group’s free Omni Sync Service, then you can create a “mail drop” email addresses. The Omni Group has this great feature call OmniFocus Mail Drop. You can send an email to a secret link and it adds the email to your OmniFocus inbox. You do have use the OmniSync service but the ability to create tasks via email is really handy. This step is just sending an email to that super-secret mail drop location.

Mail Drop isn’t necessarily a new feature for OmniFocus users, but perhaps the way I have just started using it will be.
Or perhaps I should say the way “we” have just started using it.

Omnifocus Mail Drop Syntax

Spurred on by the conversation Michael Schechter and I had with Gentry Underwood (CEO of Orchestra, the developers behind the incredibly popular Mailbox iOS app) on Episode 55 of Mikes on Mics, I’ve decided to make my Mail Drop address one that I share with my wife. We’re going to see if we can alter our communication behaviour enough so that she uses my Mail Drop address for anything she wants me to do, and my regular Gmail address for everything else.

I’ve already been forwarding tasks from my various mail apps (Postbox on Mac, Mailbox on iPhone, Mail.app on iPad) to my Mail Drop address, and now I’m inviting the most important person in my life to email tasks directly there instead. We’ve tried Flow in the past — she liked it, but not enough to make her use it on a full-time basis¹ — so we’re going to try doing this and see if we can skip the email inbox for tasks and go right to the OmniFocus inbox.

Will it stick? I’m not sure. But it certainly is worth a shot.

Omnifocus Mail Drop

Omnifocus Mail Drop Box

¹ At this point Flow would be my ideal collaborative task manager, so if this sticks then maybe a return to Flow might be in the cards for us as a team.

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