On Sun, Jun 08 2025, Ihor Radchenko wrote:
> Kristoffer Balintona <krisbalint...@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> My main problem with trying to use org-agenda for all tasks created from
>> emails is that the state and relevance of those emails may change
>> without the todos tied to them changing (unless I update it myself). In
>> other words, although capturing emails as todos (e.g. create a todo
>> which has an org link pointing to a given email) is easy enough, email
>> threads develop in a way that makes todos tied to that thread outdated.
>> The result is todos which are no longer necessary, todos scheduled for
>> dates that have already shifted, and so on.
>
> If an email thread evolves, new emails should be coming there, right?
> So, the new emails that introduce new tasks can be captured
> independently (with backlinks).
> When a thread gets long and complex, the individual email-todos can be
> grouped (refiled) under the same "thread project", so that review is
> simplified.
> If an email introduced more than a single todo, one can simply save the
> link to email and capture multiple individual todos - again under some
> "thread project".
Hmmm, interesting.
So, to be clear, you find that having an org project/todo heading for
each email thread suffices, since (i) all todos in the same thread end
up under the same project which makes (ii) finding outdated todos easier
since you see all todos for a thread together.
If that’s right, then am I right in saying that it doesn’t directly
address the problem of todos associated with emails becoming stale
(e.g., additional emails being sent in the thread that invalidate a
task, causing it to become unnecessary or modification in its details)?
Grouping email tasks by thread might make it easier to stumble upon such
stale todos, but if simply forget that a thread has associated todo(s),
then those stale todos would remain.
(N.B. Christian Moe elsewhere in this thread something that gave me
inspiration. As a notmuch user, I think it wouldn’t be too hard to add a
visual indicator on individual emails for whether there is a todo that
links to it. The same could be done for threads in thread views like
notmuch-search-mode. This way, as one browses their email they can be
reminded of the existence of todos that might become stale if they e.g.
archive the thread. This seems at first like a low-tech but effective
solution.[1])
I’ll have to chew on this for a bit. Thank you for sharing.
Footnotes:
[1] Although there is the problem of how long it would take to scrape
one’s org-agenda files for todos associated for each email. The
possibility of using more caching to ameliorate such performance
issues has been brought up recently in the org-mode mailing list:
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2025-05/msg00310.html.
--
Kind regards,
Kristoffer
