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mailto-things: Pseudo-attachment support for emails to Things.app

What It Does

The problem: The personal task manager application Things does not support attaching files/images to tasks. This is one of my main complaints about the app compared to eg. OmniFocus.

The solution: mailto-things will:

  1. Check for incoming emails in a Gmail account
  2. Strip out the attachments from each email and put the files in a directory tree on disk
  3. Replace the attachments in the email by URLs linking to the attachment files
  4. Extract text from image attachments and include it in the email's body alongside attachment links
  5. Send the modified email along to Things via the app's "Mail to Things" feature

The end result is that you can email files to your specially-configured email address, and the resulting tasks in your Things inbox contain links to those files. This is as close as I can get to actually attaching files directly to things.

Installation & Setup

macOS via Homebrew

brew install cdzombak/oss/mailto-things

Debian via apt repository

Install my Debian repository if you haven't already:

sudo apt-get install ca-certificates curl gnupg
sudo install -m 0755 -d /etc/apt/keyrings
curl -fsSL https://dist.cdzombak.net/deb.key | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg
sudo chmod 0644 /etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg
echo -e "deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/keyrings/dist-cdzombak-net.gpg] https://dist.cdzombak.net/deb/oss any oss\n" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list.d/dist-cdzombak-net.list > /dev/null
sudo apt-get update

Then install mailto-things via apt-get:

sudo apt-get install mailto-things

Manual installation from build artifacts

Pre-built binaries for Linux and macOS on various architectures are downloadable from each GitHub Release. Debian packages for each release are available as well.

Build and install locally

git clone https://github.com/cdzombak/mailto-things.git
cd mailto-things
make build

cp out/mailto-things $INSTALL_DIR

Gmail App Credentials

You will need to create a Google Cloud Platform project with access to the Gmail API. The easiest way to do that is Step 1 on Google's Gmail API Go Quickstart documentation page. Download the resulting credentials.json file and store it in a private mailto-things configuration directory on the server you'll use to run this program.

OCR Setup

The -ocr option will attempt to extract text from image attachments and include the text in the task's description (along with the link to the attachment). This requires a Google Cloud project with billing and the Vision API enabled, and a local file with Google service account credentials.

Note that using OCR is optional.

Web Hosting

Attachment files must be written to a web-accessible directory. This is beyond the scope of this README, but basically you just need a writable folder which the web server can read & serve from. (I strongly recommend disabling directory listing on that folder!)

I place attachment files in a special directory on my home NAS server, and I make them accessible on my Tailscale network using tailscale serve. I also use Syncthing to sync the folder to my laptops; this means that, in addition to my attachment files being accessible anywhere on the Tailnet, they're synchronized locally for offline use.

Usage

The first time you run the program you'll have to authorize its access to your Gmail account. Therefore, test your configuration by running mailto-things in an interactive shell before setting up a cronjob.

The following arguments (or their equivalent environment variables) are required:

  • -configDir: Path to the directory where credentials.json & user authorization tokens are stored. (Overrides environment variable MAILTO_THINGS_CONFIG_DIR.)
  • -attachmentsDir: Path to the directory on disk where attachments are stored. (Overrides environment variable MAILTO_THINGS_ATTACHMENTS_DIR.)
  • -attachmentsDirURL: URL to the directory where attachments are stored. Should not end with a slash. (Overrides environment variable MAILTO_THINGS_ATTACHMENTS_DIR_URL.)
  • -incomingEmail: Email address which receives tasks with attachments. This is your new "Things Inbox" email address, to which you will send messages. (Overrides environment variable MAILTO_THINGS_INCOMING_EMAIL.)
  • -outgoingEmail: Mail to Things email address to send task emails to. (Overrides environment variable MAILTO_THINGS_OUTGOING_EMAIL.)

The following arguments are not strictly required, but you will almost definitely need to set them:

  • -fileCreateMode: Octal value specifying the permissions used to create file attachments on disk. Must begin with 0 or 0o. Defaults to 0600.
  • -dirCreateMode: Octal value specifying the permissions used to create attachment directories on disk. Must begin with 0 or 0o. Defaults to 0700.

The following arguments are not required:

  • -dontTouchOrigMessage: If given, the original message will not be marked as read or trashed. (Overrides environment variable MAILTO_THINGS_DONT_TOUCH_ORIG_MESSAGE.) This is particularly useful when testing your setup.
  • -ocr will attempt to extract text from image attachments and include it in the task's description. See "OCR," below.
  • -help will print help and exit.
  • -version will print the version number and exit.

Cron Example

Here's an example of running mailto-things periodically via cron, adapted from my own usage:

*/5 * * * * runner -print-if-match "could not parse message part" -work-dir /home/cdzombak/mailto-things -- ./mailto-things -configDir /home/cdzombak/mailto-things/config -attachmentsDir /home/cdzombak/mailto-things/attachments -attachmentsDirURL "https://dropbox.dzombak.com/mailto-things" -fileCreateMode 0644 -dirCreateMode 0755 -incomingEmail "[email protected]" -outgoingEmail "[email protected]"

This example uses my runner tool (introductory blog post) to avoid emailing me output unless something went wrong.

Docker

Docker images are available for a variety of Linux architectures from Docker Hub and GHCR. Images are based on the scratch image and are as small as possible.

Run them via, for example:

docker run --rm \
    -v /home/cdzombak/mailto-things/config:/app-config \
    -v /home/cdzombak/mailto-things/attachments:/app-attachments \
    -e GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=/app-config/google-sa-credentials.json \
    cdzombak/mailto-things:1 \
    -configDir /app-config \
    -attachmentsDir /app-attachments \
    -attachmentsDirURL "https://example.tailnet-1234.ts.net" \
    -fileCreateMode 0644 \
    -dirCreateMode 0755 \
    -incomingEmail "[email protected]" \
    -outgoingEmail "[email protected]"

Keep in mind that all paths given as arguments are paths within the container, including the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable, so you'll have to make sure they are all mapped to the desired paths on the host.

License

GNU LGPL v3; see LICENSE in this repository.

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