Todoist is a great multi-platform task manager, and it provides facilities to integrate with many other tools including e-mail apps. Email integration is typically via forwarding your e-email to a todoist inbox email. This, however, sends the actual content of the email to Todoist, which might not be desirable all the time. In this post, we integrate Outlook with Todoist (or any other tool, actually) by creating links back to Outlook e-mails.

Todoist Plugin For Outlook
Todoist Outlook Add In

Todoist has an inbox that I send things to that I later will complete or file to do another day. I use Outlook for Mac 2016 for my emails. What I'm looking for is: When I'm going thru my emails in Outlook for Mac 2016 I would like an Alfred workflow that I can use to send a link of the Outlook for Mac email to my Todoist inbox for processing later. Integrations Connect Todoist with tools like IFTTT, Alexa, Google Calendar, and more. Getting Started Guide Everything you need to know to get your Todoist up and running in minutes. Help Center Find answers to your questions and tips for getting the most out of your Todoist. Todoist is a to-do list app and online task manager that works across 15 different platforms including Web, iOS, Android, Google Chrome, Mac, and Outlook. Turn on Applets to quickly and automatically create new tasks, and sync or share tasks across other systems and services. Todoist lets you add tasks from pretty much anywhere you can be online. In addition to being available on all the mobile app stores, Todoist has native apps on both Windows and Mac, a Chrome extension, and integrations with Gmail and Outlook. Siri and Amazon Echo integration. “Alexa, add buy Tesla Model Y in 2021.” Cons. Todoist is a to-do list app and online task manager that works across 15 different platforms including Web, iOS, Android, Google Chrome, Mac, and Outlook. Siri and Amazon Echo integration. Todoist even integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and Postbox. It lets you manage tasks from your inbox, browser, desktop, or mobile device. mhorner/OutlookToTodoist Click your avatar in the top-right.

I use Outlook for my work email, and Todoist for managing my tasks. However, every time an email results in creating a task in Todoist, I struggle finding a way to refer back to the original email. I want to do this for many reasons. Sometimes the details of the task is defined in the email, sometimes I have reference documents attached to the email, or I just need to reply back to the email when I am done with the task. Sending emails directly to Todoist is not an option for me, as my workplace policies doesn’t allow that. So, what do I do now?

After some googling around, I noticed that it is possible to interact with Outlook using Mac Automation Scripting. What I want to have is some capability to copy link to an outlook message and use it in Todoist. So, I decided to give it a go…

Before we dive into the scripting details, let’s clarify what I am trying to achieve here. I would like to be able to copy links to selected Outlook emails to clipboard, and then paste them to Todoist or any other app. The links will be something in the form of outlook://<message id>. And I want to be able to click on the links and jump back to the Outlook message.

Let’s move to the scripting details…

Mac Automation Scripting

First, we need to gather some basic understanding of how this scripting mechanism works. Mac Automation Scripting allows interacting with applications to automate tasks. AppleScript is the language that Apple provides for this purpose, but it is also possible to use JavaScript for automation as well. The built-in Script Editor application provides a very basic IDE for editing scripts. There is built-in documentation on the available libraries via File > Open Dictionay.. menu on Script Editor application.

First script: Getting selected Outlook messages

Now that we have some understanding of how Automation scripting works, it is time to get our hands dirty. Let’s first try to get some information on a selected message in Outlook.

The above script shows the subject of the selected message as a notification. You can copy and try this script in Script Editor. You can also try this with ob-applescript.el if you live in Org Mode.

As I said before, you can actually use JavaScript instead of AppleScript if you don’t feel like learning the quite uncommon syntax of AppleScript. So, here is the same functionality as above in JavaScript for comparison.

JavaScript version is more verbose, especially because it needs two additional lines to access the Standard Additions library, which provides various functions including one for displaying a notification. I would probably still use JavaScript instead of AppleScript for anything somewhat complicated, since I feel better with the more familiar syntax.

Copying the link to selected message with a shortcut

Now that we know how to get selected messages, we need to create a link to that message.

As you can see above, in addition to just creating a URI for the selected message, we now have some error handling and user interaction built into the script to make it more user-friendly.

To try the script, just run in it Script Editor as usual. When you select a message in Outlook and then run the script, it will copy the URI to the system clipboard ready to paste into Todoist (or wherever else you might want to).

Opening outlook links: a custom protocol handler

Now that we are able to copy links to outlook messages, we need a way to handle those links to go back to the Outlook message. The way to do this, is to develop a custom protocol handler. This way our newly introduced outlook://<message id> urls will be recognized by macOS.

In order to implement a custom protocol handler with AppleScript, we simply implement an open location handler as follows.

Then we need to turn this into an app package and edit its Info.plist to define our new URL scheme. Basically we need to go through the following steps:

Save the script as an app package in Script Editor. (Save.. > Format: Application)
Open Finder and locate the saved file. Right click and select Show Package Contents.
Under the Contents folder, open Info.plist with your favorite text editor, and add the following content before the last two lines.
Save the file. Go back to your app and double click to execute it.

Now we are basically done. If you want to see it working, copy an Outlook message link and paste it to Todoist. Then, you should be able to just click on the link and get back to your e-mail in Outlook. You can use this link in many other places, including the command line (just run open <your outlook link>).

Putting it all together

At this point, we have script that can copy links to Outlook to clipboard, so that we can paste the link to another application. And we can also click on that link (in most apps, including Todoist) to get back to Outlook. We are almost done, but not quite yet. Copying the links is very tedious…

We need to go to Outlook to select a message, and then open our script in Script Editor and run it to copy links to clipboard. This process is not efficient at all. Let’s see what we can do to make this more streamlined.

We have a few options here. One option is to use Automator app to define a service with our script, and then add a keyboard shortcut to our new service. For me this didn’t work reliably unfortunately.

Another option is enabling system-wide script menu. Intocable mix 2014. Just go to Script Editor app, and select Script Editor > Preferences menu, and enable Show Script menu in menu bar. This gives yo

Todoist For Outlook Mac