Turn Emails into Things Tasks

Postbox's Quick Post feature enables you to quickly set up and use send-to-service email addresses. Best of all, you can send content to the service in the background, without having to open up a compose window.

Using your Things email address, you can turn emails into items on your to-do list. Turn emails from your boss into your schedule for the day or forward your kids' activities to your spouse's to-do list using Things, and get everything done. Note: Things is only available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Find your Things email address

First, you must enable Things Cloud. Head to the menu bar at the top of your screen. Click Things > Preferences > Things Cloud tab > Mail to Things > Manage > check the box next to Enable "Mail to Things". Once Things Cloud is enabled, a unique email address will be generated, and it will look something like this: [email protected]. Any email sent to this address will be added as a task in your Inbox.

Create your Quick Post

In Postbox, navigate to Preferences or Options > Advanced > Quick Post and then click the + button to create a new Quick Post.

Create a name for the Quick Post, then enter your Things email address.

Turn Emails into Things Tasks

Notes: In Things, you cannot set tags or any other metadata, like due dates, using email. Emails will be shortened if they are longer than 2,000 characters. Only plain text is supported in Things. All file attachments will be lost when sent to Things.

Specify how the message should be sent

Send As Attachment is usually the best way to go since you're forwarding the original email. Services can then do the right thing with regards to images as attachments, for instance.

Send should be used when the service doesn't know how to process .eml files as attachments, like Trello or Slack. However, it does have some limitations. For example, images embedded into the message body as an IMAP URL won't show in the destination.

Send via Compose Window will bring up the Compose Window, which you can then edit before sending. This option is also the best one to use for images embedded into the message body as an IMAP URL.

Automatic email filtering or forwarding

You can also set up Postbox's email filters to automatically trigger a Quick Post when you receive an email from a specific sender or with a particular subject.

For example, you can configure Postbox to quick post any emails sent from "Your Wife" with "Gymnastics" in the subject line to your to-do list.

To set this up, go to Postbox's Tools menu > Message Filters > New, set your filter criteria, then for the action select Quick Post and then your desired Quick Post.

But note that messages are always sent As Attachment when using a filter action because, by their nature, filter actions run in the background. So be sure to select "Send as Attachment" within the editor panel for this Quick Post.