Mac tip: Mail Act-On and Yojimbo working together for organization
There are several indispensable tools I use on my Mac to keep me organized and efficient. (“Okay, Melanie, stop laughing.”) I mean, slightly less chaotic than a room full of 3-year-olds hopped up on cake and ice cream.
Anyway, two of the tools that I just figured out how to get working together are Mail Act-On from indev software and Yojimbo from Bare Bones Software. Mail Act-On is a neat little addition to Apple’s Mail that allows you to perform numerous actions—from simple things like filing an email in a folder to more complex actions such as executing an AppleScript—with just a keypress. Yojimbo, meanwhile, is a standalone program that acts as a repository for all kinds of documents, tagging them and keeping them organized.
As an example of how I use Yojimbo, I print receipts from online shopping to a PDF (a built-in function of OS X and a tip I’ll share later) right to Yojimbo. I also use it store software serial numbers and the myriad of text, PDF, and Word documents, as well as non-personal pictures, I’ve gathered over the years and that were cluttering up my hard drive.
What I was missing was a simple way to file particular emails in Yojimbo. Sure, I could print the email to a PDF and put that in Yojimbo, but that was more complicated than I thought it should be. So I turned to “the Google”.
That’s where I stumbled on this blog post and an AppleScript that connects Mail and Yojimbo. It’s exactly what I was looking for, since it takes the entire email, including sender and subject and date, and makes it a new Yojimbo document.
So all I had to do was create a Mail Act-On rule, which would activate the AppleScript on a keypress.
Success! Now I can quickly file my email, not just into my email folders, but also into my document organizer, too. Organized! Efficient!
P.S. My other Mail Act-On rules mark an email as “blogworthy”, meaning I want to blog about it later; mark the email as part of one or more ongoing projects using Mail Act-On’s sister product, MailTags; send the email to OmniFocus, personal productivity software; and more.
