This was a great episode. I wanted to add that for those in corporations ruled by MS365, a great email automation to add is using PowerAutomate. I only considered using it this week to solve a problem where I wanted to auto-decline some recurring meetings. Outlook for desktop doesnāt let you set up a way to do this without Outlook running and Outlook web didnāt have this functionality. Thankfully I was able to use PowerAutomate to do this which has made me very happy.
PowerAutomate is great if the features you need are included in the plan youāre on!
David mentioned something about sync contactsā¦ I tried that on the past and I ended up with some contacts missing ā¦ @MacSparky, can you share how you do it?
Loved the showā¦ I heard it driving and will now hear it again at home during the weekend to play more with some stuff you and @RosemaryOrchard mentionedā¦ thanks .
Today they are only on iCloud, would like to have them on fastmail also ā¦ for exampleā¦
Something that wasnāt mentioned on the show but I think some people might like it:
Google have an integrated scripting service that runs on their cloud servers and can take control over all of their services, including emails. It is called Apps Script
You can create javascript code, manipulating gmail, google calendar or other services, and schedule the script to run at specific intervals or triggers. It becomes incredibly powerful really quickly.
3 examples of scripts that I use:
Email cleaning
There are some emails that I keep on my inbox in case I want to look at it, but if I let it for too long they will pile up. So I have some rules to auto tag emails by sender or subject or whatever. Then I use google script to look at my email daily and check for some tags. If the email has a specific tag and it is marked as read (that means, I opened it), then archive it. If it has a tag and wasnāt opened, let it on the inbox if the date is less than 2 days. Otherwise mark it as read and archive it.
With this I can let my emails visible a couple of days, but if I donāt interact with them they are automatically archived.
Auto parsing text and scheduling
My university sometimes sends me automatic emails with some event that I need to attend to. The email always have the same pattern. A date, title, link, address etc. So I have a script that periodically checks if I got an email with a specific title, and then I use regex to extract the data I need. Then it automatically adds this info to my google calendar. And since it uses javascript, I could even add a webhook to push me a notification in case I need to remember it again. It never fails, it is so beautiful!
Read later
I subscribe to some newsletters so for some specific ones I like to add the items into a āread laterā database on airtable. I want to use Notion, but I am more used to airtableās api. Anyway, my script gets the content of the email, which is a newsletter, and it parses the titles and links. Then it feeds into an airtable and archive the email. Later I just have to to my read next table and select which ones I want to read or not
So yeah, if you are into scripting, it does worth taking a look at googleās Apps Script.
This episode comes as a perfect time for me, as i just switched my email over to Gmail from having it selfhosted.
I have already played around with the filters and so far Iām impressed.
But the interesting feature so far is definitely that Gmail uses Tags, instead of folders, which makes my Integromat Invoice exporter so much nicer.
When we used to be on Gmail at work, this is exactly how I made my e-mail manageable. Rather than tagging and archiving e-mail myself, I had a script that ran several times a day. It would check e-mail I had opened, weāre read more than 4 hours ago (to avoid any that I might have open and working on when the script ran), but not flagged for follow-up and then process them. It got me round the Gmail rule limitation of only processing new e-mails. On busy days, such as after a stint of annual leave, I would also trigger it from a browser bookmark to help clean as I went.
Sieve scripts in Fastmail are also pretty nice.
I use them to automatically:
- add tasks to my to-do list using Remember The Milk for Email
- generate push notifications using Pushoverās email gateway for logins for critical services like 1Password, Hover, or iCloud
Unfortunately these all use the notify extension, which Fastmail is planning to phase outā¦ 
Rosemary mentioned Feedbin for newsletters. Some additions to that:
- Feedly also supports newsletters, but unfortunately only in the Pro+ plan (I have Pro).
- A free alternative is Kill the Newsletter!, which you can even host yourself (if desired).
Oh bingo, Iāve been looking for something like this this weekend!
BLUF: Iām quite happy with the email automation I get from Microsoft O365. Enough that I pay for it personally and itās where I manage my personal email, as well as the organizational email from a non-profit I help administer. I do also use Exchange at work (where I learned to be an O365 tenant admin).
Iāve done email rules in both Outlook (which runs the rules server-side in Exchange) and in GMail (web interface). Iāve never run into anything I wanted to do with Exchange rules that was particularly difficult. My sense is that what I can do with Exchange email rules is at least as powerful as what I could do with GMail email rules. I do use the Outlook client for building the email rules (nice GUI for doing that), but I use Mac mail as my day-in/day-out client (both personally and professionally). I find Mac Mail is much better behaved with Exchange than it is with GMail.
As an aside, Mac mail has a killer feature for me at work, which is that I have Mail on my work Mac configured so that any email thatās going to someone not @mycompany.com shows up as bright red in the compose window. Thatās saved my bacon lots of times, both for where I have work colleagues where I have their personal email address also in the contact and for the case where I have professional colleagues with the same (or very similar) names one of whom works for mycompany and one who does not.
Is there any automation capability for Mail.app on iOS / iPad OS? Perhaps some Shortcuts support.
Iām clutching at straws here - as I know you canāt kick anything off from within Mail.app.
You can get a prompt to run a Shortcut when you receive an email. Thatās it, unfortunately.
Thanks. Thatās rather what I feared.
The best Iāve been able to do is connecting to the Gmail API via Scriptable, but yeah nothing directly for the Mail app
Iām trying to use Integromat with my iCloud email but none of the IMAP settings are working?
Is this because iCloud canāt be used directly with Integromat or perhaps I just have the wrong IMAP settings?
Any ideas?
I would think itās the wrong IMAP settings - it definitely worked for me. Unfortunately Iāve already reconfigured my automations, so I canāt screenshot it for you!
Sorry for the late reply, I must have missed the notification of response.
I will double check my IMAP settings in that caseā¦ thanks for taking the time to respond.
EDIT:
Still not workingā¦ HELP!
EDIT:
It needed an āapp specific passwordā generated by Apple for it to work, it wouldnāt use my normal credentialsā¦ hope this information is helpful to someone else.
You can have rules trigger AppleScript, which could then, in turn, do all the Keyboard Maestro things.
Right. But thatās on Mac OS. For reasons I wonāt bore you with the only Apple email client I can use for work is mail.app on iPad OS.