Here’s a place where Lotus Notes doesn’t completely suck.

It has a “send and file” button, which gives you a chance to put your sent message into your waiting_for folder. It’s nice that it’s the sent message, and not a received one, since Notes visually distinguishes the two in the view.

Or if you are using Mail.app you can use MailTags and Mail Act On. Both of which have specific features for both setting due dates on email (as well as project categorization) and through Mail Act On you can set up a rule to defer your due date till whenever and at that time it will pop up in a smart mailbox as a reminder.

I’m positive (without looking) that these Mail.app plug-ins have been covered here before as they are ESSENTIAL to Mail.app based GTD… but nevertheless, nothing needs to be done like bcc/applescript-fu in order to accomplish this.

If you excuse the comment from the developer, something you may be interested in is MailTags for Apple’s Mail.app for OS X 10.4.

MailTags allows you to tag messages with projects, priorities, due dates and notes. These can be search through spotlight and in Smart Mailboxes.

In upcoming Version 1.1, you will also be able to tag multiple keywords, list gmail like conversations, tag outgoing messages, search for tags on the fly and more.

http://www.indev.ca/MailTags.html for more info. http://www.indev.ca/smorr for the developer blog.

Thanks for passing this tip along here, Merlin! :)

Can anyone verify that email servers ignore the text string between “+” and “@” but will still pass it along in the headers?

I can verify that the ‘+’/’@’ thing does NOT work for MS Exchange and any e-mail address at .Mac. (Or gmx.net, but that’s probably not quite that popular)

Based on the fact that the current sample is 3 negatives out of 3, I’d say it probably doesn’t work…

Thanks for pointing out MailTags, though!

Thanks Robert. I tested it with my site (hosted at Potent Products) - no joy. I can at least use it for Gmail.

Of course, if your application supports adding arbitrary headers, you could always add ‘X-Mailhack-Tagging:Waitingfor’ or somesuch….

(Does Mail.App do it? They force me to leave my Powerbook at the door at my current workplace…)

My bad, and I’ll bet I know why—I’m testing on a server with a catch-all in place. WANH-wanh.

Gmail it is.

Yea, I tried it the + idea in the e-mail address. I can confirm that it doesn’t work on an exchange server. Bummer. This would have been an even simpler solution.

The +whatever@ trick doesn’t work if you BCC yourself, because your mail client can’t see what address was BCC’d.

I figured out a fairly painless workaround that doesn’t involve setting up a separate account:

Using a + in your email is a setting in the email server software. I know nothing about Exchange but that should be something you (or the sysadmin) could implement. It’s a standard thing, it’s just not default on a lot of servers.

Somebody should lobby gmail to do the right thing and allow the +, it’s a great way of tracking spam (put email+site@domain.com as your email, track if you get spam to that address). No muss, no fuss.

Similar to the Notes feature described above, I just learned of a Thunderbird extension allows for storing outbound messages on the fly as well (linked, btw, through the e-mail article Merlin blogged about later in the day). It allows you to file a copy in any folder you’d like and even has different settings for new mail and replies/forwards. Pretty snazzy!

Gmail does allow it, and you can filter according to the stuff after + and before @.

Mathias

You actually don’t need a second e-mail account. Just use an alias to your existing address. Most business accounts are supplied with a handful of aliases. Or if you’re your own boss, create an alias to use as a BCC address.

I just put “REQ:” (for “request”) at the head of the subject line, and have Eudora filters drop a copy of any such outgoing email into my “pending requests” folder. Doesn’t need extra addresses, etc. :-) Doesn’t give me MailActOn either (which sounds cool) :-(

QMail servers use the + trick. A long long time ago (25 years or so) you could also use % (it was an escape to feed internet email into older, preinternet mail systems). Adelphia doesn’t even allow addresses with a % in them to go out.

Postfix out of the box and Gmail don’t support “+”, although the admin can turn it on for Postfix (or so I’ve read in a quick Google check). I think Exim can support it, but I don’t know if, like QMail, it supports it by default.