UPDATE: Due to a PEBKAC error (Wikipedia 
) on my part, this feature currently only exists in internal builds of the beta. Think of it as a mouth-watering foretaste of more MailTags goodness to come in the next public beta, not as incompetence or cruelty on my part.
A week ago I posted about linkaboo, an app that provides a framework for linking to your emails in iCal, personal information managers and many other apps.
Stupidly I quite forgot that users of MailTags’ current Public Beta can (not quite yet) do the same thing, and do it better.
But the subject came up on the beta testers mailing list today, and it is good enough to share.
In the beta, all you need to do is highlight the message, press ⌃⌥⌘U or right-click on the message in the Message Viewer and select the “Copy Message Url” option:
That copies a link in the format message://EAAEED88-B00B-4B62-9A9B-F25CF4495BF8@hawkwings.net into your clipboard, which you can then paste in the personal information manager or other app of your choice, for example, Yojimbo:
Unlike linkaboo’s links these are not formatted up as hyperlinks, but they work just as well. Right-click on the link, select the “Open URL” option and the message is found.
This is better than linkaboo because:
- It works for IMAP accounts as well as for POP ones.
- It doesn’t involve an additional app.
- MailTags is God’s own preferred plugin for Apple Mail.
[...] I’ve wanted this for so long it’s incredible. Thank you, MailTags. [...]
One thing that should be noted is that Mail will not respond to a message:// protocol if MailTags is not installed. (in fact, if you once had mailTags installed and since removed it — you may need to deregister the message:// handler to not point to mail as that may have unpredictable results — I should get a how-to on that out later.
This is my number one missing feature in Mail. (or, for that matter any other decent mailclient I used). Please test, release and make me happy.
I’m on Hawk Wings. Fame ;-)
Seriously, I’ve been using this since I posted on the MailTags list, and it works great. Everything now sits in my GTD system (GTDAlt with TextMate) and my Action and Hold mailboxes are now a thing of the past. (I guess now Mail is a fridge, not an oven…)
When I highlight an email and right click on it, I get the Copy MailTags and Paste MailTags commands, but nothing about Copy Message URL. I’m using Tiger, Mail 2.1 and MailTags 2.0b31. What am I missing?
@Alan: Notoriety, perhaps :) I hadn’t thought of the opportunities it opens up for TextMate bundles. Thanks for the tip-off.
@jbarnabasi: You are probably missing my stupidity in posting about something that is still restricted to the internal builds of the beta, but which will be in the next public beta (not far away).
Thanks. I’m looking forward to the next public beta.
[...] The new version also provides for hyperlinking within items. You can add web URLs or links to emails with LinkABoo or (soon) MailTags and add links to files and folder just by dragging them onto the hyperlink dialog: [...]
[...] If your email is IMAP, you are better off waiting for the next MailTags public beta which is plenty robust and creates reliable, move-proof hyperlinks back to your emails. [...]
Newbie question, is one of those solutions where some portion of this functionality going to be in 10.5?