How to: Forward mail to Mindmanager

This can be useful for example if you are using Mindmanager as the hub of your Getting things done universe.

Create a RSS topic in your mind map. Make it read from mailbucket.org/something.xml – using your own label instead of “something”. Instructions.
Check that there is not already any RSS content (in that case, change “something”).
Forward mail to something@mailbucket.org.
In the map, select your RSS topic, and press F5. The forwarded mail should now show as a subtopic.
Drag it to wherever you want it. (Or you can leave it where it is, but in that case it will sooner or later scroll of the list and disappear.)

You can use different mailbucket addresses for different GTD folders, projects etc.

The mail can be forwarded manually or automatically by using filter in your mail program.

Mail to RSS problems

Using Mailbucket is extremely simple – but the drawback is that there is no privacy. Anyone can read your something-channel.

Also, Mailbucket will mangle accented characters (at least Swedish ones).

There are alternatives for the mail-to-RSS-conversion:

Gmail. But there is no obvious way to get the RSS reader in Mindmanager to use a password protected RSS channel. And it is in Atom, which I’m not sure Mindmanager handles.
email2rss. A Perl script to install at your mail server.
See also PassingNotes.

Forward mail to OneNote

Rss2OneNote (download page) is an application that sends rss to OneNote. I’ve tested it with OneNote 2007, and while I’m able to get the mail titles into OneNote, for some reason the body of the mails does not survive the transfer. Maybe it’s a problem with the RSS format of Mailbucket, maybe it’s something else…