I got clued in to this tweet by the wonderful Federico Viticci through the latest Shortcuts newsletter from the equally wonderful Matthew Cassinelli and was enthralled by the possibility of grabbing an email's URL to refer to it from outside of Mail.app.
Because I get a lot of email, it is often the source of knowledge, wisdom, and tasks, and so being able to refer to emails in other contexts (say, from tasks in OmniFocus or rapid-logged journaling in Agenda) is really valuable. So I set to work to make a Shortcut to manage just this.
I am generally opposed to AppleScript, JavaScript, or AnyScriptAtAll, simply because I'm not a developer, and I find these things too hard. Shortcuts is my jam. But until Mail gets Shortcuts support or a Share Sheet or something (come on, you cowards), I ran towards the danger a bit here.
This Mac-only Shortcut (because AppleScript) is for use with the Agenda app and my Agenda Daily Log Shortcut. It appends provided input to an Agenda note titled as EEEE MMMM d, yyyy (i.e. Saturday September 3, 2022), along with the currently selected email.
This Shortcut works very much like my Rapid Log Shortcut, except that it captures the currently selected email. That email will then be appended to anything entered in the Rapid Log, referred to by a reference that is asked for following the entry of Rapid Log content, linked back to the actual email itself.
The Shortcut will then archive the selected email (using the sending of keystroke ^ + ⌘ + a), bringing you back in to the Mail app, so that you can go on your merry way and Rapid Clip the next one (or hopefully just delete all the email).
The use case here is fast inbox processing, and this Shortcut is best used when invoked by a keyboard shortcut (there are too many kinds of shortcuts). Note that this Shortcut (capital S Shortcut) here offers all the same syntax support as the Rapid Logger, meaning that tasks can be generated in OmniFocus (which also contain the link to the referenced email), tagged and noted accordingly.
