If you have a Pocket PC or Smartphone, you may be interested in FlexMail 2007 as a replacement for the built-in email application. FlexMail has a number of capabilities that the regular email client does not have, but the one I want to highlight in this post is its ability to transform an email into a Task with your Tasks application.
Why would you want to do this? Well, chances are you have some, maybe several, emails that contain somewhere within them one or more actions for you to do, and it pays to have a system for keeping track of these actions. The natural way to do this is to put the action into your task list. You can do this manually, of course, but FlexMail lets you easily do it while you’re reading the email by directly enabling you to turn the email into a task.
Let’s take a look at a screenshot that illustrates how easy FlexMail makes this:
When you select “Create From Message,” you are given a choice of converting the email to a Task or to an Appointment. In either case, the app creates a new Task (or appointment), gives it the same name as the subject line of the email, and copies the text of the email into the Notes section of the Task (or appointment). Of course, you can change the name of the Task, and you probably would want to, to make clear what the task is (email subject lines are often deceptive). You can also assign dates and a category (such as @Office) to the task.
This is really a useful app for putting all those embedded, hidden tasks from your emails into your Task list so you don’t forget to do the actions. There may be other similar email clients that will also do this, but I am not aware of any.
If you use a BlackBerry, you may be interested in knowing that the developer is planning a release of this product for you. No word yet on when it will be available, but from what I gather from reading the posts in the testing forums on the developer’s site, apparently it will be in the relatively near term.