- Video OmniFocus; Mail Drop. Support Human Aaron shows you how to use Mail Drop to capture actions to OmniFocus for iPhone.
- While you can drag and drop email onto Omnifocus on an iPad to accomplish this, and use the clipper on the Mac, there isn’t any way to do this on the iPhone, short of using a 3rd party mail app. While you can use Mail Drop to email something to Omnifocus, it won’t contain any link back.
We’ve mentioned this tip before in our 10 simple OmniFocus tips. When you sign up for Omni Sync and use it as your sync solution, you’ll get a unique email addressed assigned. Just email this address with your subject line as your OmniFocus entry and you’re all set. It will appear in your OmniFocus inbox seconds later.
Create an account, and then choose Synchronization from Preferences in the OmniFocus menu. Select Omni Sync Server, and then enter the account name that you just created. Once your password has been entered, you’re done! One of the more exciting features you’ll get—Mail Drop. To set up Mail Drop, open your Omni Sync Server account and click Add an Address under the Mail Drop settings. OmniFocus will make a randomly generated email address with your username—and you can add multiple addresses if you'd like.
Speeding Up OmniFocus Sync
Omnifocus Mail Drop
Some great tips by Sven Fechner on how you can speed OmniFocus sync. It involves archiving data on the Mac and resetting sync databases on your iOS devices:
The free OmniSync Server makes life a lot easier and keeps your OmniFocus world, well, in sync. If you use your own WebDAV server you have the same capabilities but without the awesome “Mail Drop” feature which allows you to email in your actions.
While the OmniSync Server is fairly reliable, it is not necessarily the fastest syncing solution on the planet. In particular when your database gets larger and more convoluted.
It’s the first time I’ve followed this procedure, and, indeed, my OmniFocus database has been slimmed down and it now takes 5-8 seconds less to sync on WiFi; the improvement is even more considerable on 3G.
I’ve used my own WebDAV server with OmniFocus for months, but the convenience (and simplicity) of the Mail Drop feature lured me back to Omni Sync Server. Mail Drop works amazingly well in conjunction with Drafts, allowing me to quickly send off a task to my OmniFocus inbox in the cloud. In moving to Omni Sync Server, I didn’t lose the ability to have the latest version of my OmniFocus database mirrored to a calendar: OmniFocus does, in fact, come with some great debug commands to change its default sync times.
As an aside, while looking forward to OmniFocus 2, The Omni Group has posted the first batch of videos from The Setup event in San Francisco a few weeks ago. You can watch them here.
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.
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.
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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Omnifocus Mail Drop Syntax
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