The OmniFocus Mail Drop

The last few days there has been something of a coming out party for early beta testers in Omni’s Mail Drop Service. So at this moment I can’t help but stand up and say, “My name is David, and I’m an Omni-holic.” The kind folks at the Omni Group let me start testing this quite awhile ago and it has been absolutely killing me that I couldn’t tell anyone about it. The way this service works is really simple.

1. You get a special, super-secret, email address and add it to your address book.

2. You forward any email worthy of an OmniFocus task to that address.


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3. You move on with your day. At some point you’ll find yourself back in OmniFocus and you’ll find an new inbox entry with the text of the mail in the note. It actually happens in just minutes.


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I’ve been using this for months and it works exactly how you’d expect it. The only downside is that it doesn’t give you a one-click link to jump to the mail message the way the Clip-O-Tron does on the Mac. Having used this for awhile though, I can say I miss that feature far less often than I thought I would.

Moreover, the ability to send emails to OmniFocus from my iPad and iPhone with nothing more than a forwarded email feels like nothing short of magic. You’ll need to be syncing your data through Omni’s servers to pull this off but, frankly, you should already be doing that anyway. At this point I recommend running here and getting in. It will change your game.