HackMake

Building Email Templates into OmniFocus Tasks

I have a few recurring tasks in OmniFocus that are like “Email weekly update” or “Email change log”. Here’s an easy way to build email templetes right into OmniFocus task notes so that you are one click away from sending that recurring email.

The basis of this little hack is our old friend mailto:. This standard can handle much more than just a single address. In one link, you can include a list of to: addresses, cc: addresses, bcc: addresses, a subject, and a body.

The format that works with Mail.app1 looks like this:

mailto:name@email.com, anothername@email.com?cc=thatguy@email.com&subject=Weekly Recap&body=Here's a recap of what happened this week: 

All you need to do to set this up in a recurring task is to go to the notes field and add in a short note like “Weekly Recap Email Template” then select the text and go Format > Text > Add Link and paste in the mailto: link you created.

Now whenever you need to send out that email, you have a template built right into the OmniFocus task.


  1. Unfortunately, these template links don’t survive the sync to iPhone or iPad.↩︎