Entourage GTD: Tickling Your Email
July 14th, 2007 by Adam Sneller
You remember when the Wizard of Oz said “Go away and come back tomorrow”? Well, that is exactly what a Tickler File lets you say to your email, “Go away and don’t bother me until you are actionable!” And you would use this for what?
- Your phone bill arrives on the 1st… but it’s not due until the 30th.
(”Go away and come back on the 25th”). - The latest cost reports arrive… on Friday
(”Go away and come back next week”). - There’s a sale at Penny’s!!!!
(”Go a away and… DELETE“)
But one of the most useful things you can do with this is track the actions you have assigned to other people. For example, you order a book online and want to make sure that you receive it. Simply tickle the email confirmation until the book is due to arrive.
Another variation is to setup your email account to always BCC you on outgoing mail. This acts like a receipt for a job order, which you can then tickle until it’s time to follow up (Oooooh).
How it All Works
An email tickler can be implemented in a number of ways. The most basic is to create a set of 43 folders labeled 1-31 (one for each day of the month) and the remaining twelve labeled “January” through “December”. If you want to defer a message, you just drag it to the appropriate folder. The next time you check your email, open the folder that corresponds to today’s date and voila! Well, almost.
Like most things that work good in theory, actually implementing an email tickler can be a bit of a pain. For instance, do you really want to be dragging-and-dropping your email from folder to folder, and folder to sub-folder, and where did that email go? And what happens if you forget to check today’s folder all together? If you remember to check tomorrow’s folder, but not today’s folder, is that email then lost forever??? And why can’t this thing just send my email back to my Inbox when it’s due?!!!
The Scripted Tickler
Enter the world of AppleScript. Here we find a set of scripts that let you send email to a single @Tickler folder. Messages can be deferred 1 day, 3 days, 7 days, to next month, or even next quarter. At the end-of-which, each email is sent back to your Inbox automatically. And best of all, each script has its own keyboard shortcut, so you never have to take your fingers off the keyboard!
Requirements
These scripts are built to run on OS 10.4 Tiger with Entourage 2004. If you are running OS 10.3, please download these Panther Scripts instead. Then continue with Step 2 of the Installation. Both versions use the same Tickler Engine (see below).
Note: the Tickler scripts are designed to work with a POP3 email account and do NOT yet support IMAP or Exchange Server. If you absolutely have to use an IMAP or Exchange account, please see this comment for a work-around.
Installation
- If you have not already, close out of Entourage.
- Download and extract the file Tickler Scripts and place these in your “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items/” folder (the “~/” is Unix shorthand for your “home” folder).
- Now download and extract the Tickler Engine to your “~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Microsoft Entourage” folder (if you don’t already have this, go ahead and create it.
- Next we are going to schedule our tickler engine to periodically check for email that has come due. Open Entourage and click on Tools > Schedules > New. Fill this out as shown below and you’re done!
Usage
If all went according to plan, you should now see your tickler scripts in the Entourage Scripts Menu. Try them out! Highlight one or more emails and hit Ctrl-1, Ctrl-2, Ctrl-3 to Tickle your email 1, 3, or 7 days, or Ctrl-4 or Ctrl-5 to tickle them one month or one quarter, respectively. The message is then swept out of your Inbox and placed in a folder called @Tickler (don’t worry if you don’t have this. It will create it for you). Each email is linked to a task whose due date is set accordingly. When the date is up, the tickler engine deletes the task and moves the message back to your Inbox for review.
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July 16th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I’ve been waiting for this and didn’t even know it. Thanks for this. F’in awesome.
July 25th, 2007 at 9:27 am
I successfully installed the script. I’m able to tickle the file for one day, however, I get an error message like: “Can’t make 8 into the expected type.” Thought I’d report if it’s a bug that needs to be fixed.
July 26th, 2007 at 10:37 am
Doris - thank you very much for contacting me about this!
This has to do with how AppleScript in Panther handles Date/Time arithmetic. Apparently the Tickler Scripts make use of AppleScript features that are new in Tiger.
Here are some revised Panther Scripts which resolve this issue (see “Requirements” above).
Best,
-Adam
July 26th, 2007 at 11:43 am
It works! Thanks for fixing the problem. This is a handy tool.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I loaded the tickler scripts. When I initiate the script the email is moved to the @tickler folder and the task is created. So far so good.
However, I get the error “Can’t set read status of incoming message id 63809 to untouched”.
Also, the message never gets placed back in my Inbox.
August 1st, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Follow Up to Last Post
I am accessing an exchange server. If I move the email item for the Inbox on the exchange server to the Inbox (located on my computer) it seems to work fine.
Darned exchanged server:(
August 1st, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Ed - thanks for posting these comments!
The Tickler Scripts are designed to work with email that is stored on your local machine (e.g., messages that you download from a POP3 account).
If this is the only computer you use to check your email (which may defeat the purpose of using Exchange), you can create a Rule in Entourage that moves all your Exchange email to your the Inbox on your computer.
If support for Exchange, IMAP, Hotmail, etc. is something people are interested in, I’m happy to take a swing at this for version 2.0.
Best,
-Adam
September 9th, 2007 at 7:35 pm
Hi Adam - I like this a lot. I had set up the 43 folders, but it was a hassle to remember to dump things out of my folder each day into my inbox, then move that folder to the next month, etc. I’ve tickled something to tomorrow, so I look forward to seeing how this works. I also like having all of the tickled items in one folder instead of 43, so if I’m looking for a message and can’t remember how far out I tickled it, it will be in one folder, and I won’t need to go hunting in several others.
September 12th, 2007 at 3:02 pm
Hello Adam,
I have enjoyed reading your website. I installed the scripts and the Tickler Engine (called “Run Tickler” once it unzips) but recieve the message: Microsoft Entourage got an error: Can’t get category “Tickler” when opening Entourage.
There is no @tickler folder and consequently messages are not deferred - or I have no way of knowing if they deferred sucessfully.
Thanks for any help.
-Roy
September 12th, 2007 at 3:27 pm
Roy - good question!
The “Run Tickler” script is responsible for returning your “tickled” email to the Inbox, once it comes due. You need to tell the Entourage Scheduler to run this script “On Startup”. But this is not a script that you would execute directly.
In order to defer a message, run one of the “Tickler Scripts” (e.g., “Tickle 1 Day”, “Tickle 3 Days”, “Tickle 7 Days”, etc). These scripts will create the “Tickler” category and the “@Tickler” mail folder for you (if they do not already exist).
Best,
-Adam
September 14th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Adam,
Thanks for the help. The tickler scripts work wonderfully. I appreciate very much the time you spent helping me through my installation and your quick responses. The other scripts (Calendar Scripts, Quick Delete, Quick Project) are great.
Thanks and best to you,
-Roy
October 17th, 2007 at 10:55 pm
Absolutely brilliant, what a concept!
August 1st, 2008 at 9:00 pm
G’Day Adam,
Good stuff here. This is certainly a useful script.
Any ideas on how to get it working with IMAP? I saw a link to a comment that indicated you could use an exchange rule to move everything to your INBOX, but it wasn’t clear how that would help.
Actually, there’s another problem for those Cyrus users, apparently you can’t create either a sub-folder of INBOX, nor can you give a sub-folder elsewhere a name beginning with ‘@’.
Any suggestions?
Cheers,
- SteveN
August 17th, 2008 at 2:16 pm
Hi There Adam,
Great scripts - making things much easier for a lot of people!
Just a quick question from me, is there any idea if/when there will be an updated version of this script compatible with Exchange?
Many Thanks
August 18th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Steve - is Cyrus a hosting service? These scripts create an @Tickler folder under “Folders on My Computer”, so I wouldn’t think this would be a problem?
Iain - I’ve been kicking around some ideas on how to integrate these scripts with IMAP and Exchange. I’m going to try and work this up over the holidays (Aug 29 thru Sept 25).
Best,
-Adam