I just had this interaction with our IT department:

Me: “I can’t get to my email. Web, iPhone, client, nothing.”

IT: “Well there’s no maintenance going on right now.”

IT: “Oh yeah, there’s maintenance on those servers going on right now.”

Me: “When will it be done?”

IT: “Midnight tomorrow night.”

Me: “…! A day of no email?”

IT: “Maybe. Maybe they’re doing some maintenance in chunks. I don’t know.”

Me: “I really need some notification of email being down anytime for any amount of time. We all use that to communicate.”

IT: “Well, we sent out the notifications to those who subscribed.”

Me: “Does everyone subscribe to infrastructure notifications? And how would I retrieve it if the maintenance makes it unavailable?”

IT: “I’m not sure.”

I know some will defend IT. To them I say: IT owns their branding. And this is how I will remember them for the immediate future.

A while back I created an Entourage script to create tasks from email messages in Remember the Milk. Well, I finally got around to improving it.

You don’t have to be a geek (or nerd, or goober) to use the new features (see Enhancements below). Anyone with Entourage and an iDisk will be able to use the attachments functionality.

The installation is still the same as the first release. Here are the previous instructions:

1. Unzip and save in “~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items”
2. Rename “Create Task from Message\cT.scpt” to “Create Task from Message.scpt”
3. Start Entourage (you do not need to restart if its already running).
4. Highlight a message and hit ^T.
5. Follow the onscreen instructions.
6. Get organized!

I don’t like to repeat myself, so here’s the release notes, which covers the new features:

Version History
v0.2 – July 6, 2008
- Enhancements
- Ability to configure a remote disk to store files, and add the URL to the RTM task’s URL field.
- Tested only with iDisk.
- Requires the remote disk to be mountable via WebDAV.
- The URL will be http://[remoteURL you enter]/RTM-Attachments
- You can change the name of the folder via the remoteDiskFolder variable in the properties declaration section below
- Uploads may take a while, depending on speed, size of upload, and other factor that I can’t predict. Be patient.
- Stuff you can store on the remote drive:
- One or more, or all, of the attachments of an email
- The entire email, as a .eml file
-
- Only the text/plain parts of a message are added to the notes of a task, gone is all the formatted stuff that didn’t look right anyways and was pretty unlegible.
- Large notes are broken up, instead of truncated, and fed into RTM in reverse order, so that the notes can be read just like the original email.
- Known issues
- useEmailToCreateTasks doesn’t work when using the remote disk folder and attachments. The task gets created, but everything (list name and URL) end up in the notes. However, try the new API functionality, as it’s way improved with the breakdown of large notes.
v0.1 – Initial release

Here’s the high level logic for creating attachments, for the interested parties. (Click for a bigger picture)

I’ll do my best to answer your questions in the comments.

Get it here.

Update: Updated the version, as the previous one had a bug with certain special characters in filenames and/or subject lines. I had also (accidentally) distributed the last scpt as read-only.

Update 2: Added a screen walkthrough here.

Update 3: A few more fixes and enhancements:

v0.2c – July 6, 2008
- Enhancements
- Allows for configurable task title naming during task creation
- See editTaskTitle below
- Bug Fixes
- More special character handling
v0.2b – July 6, 2008
- Bug Fixes
-Replaced certain special characters in filenames and subjects to avoid filesystem errors

Technorati Tags: Attachments, Entourage, Organize, Remember the Milk, RTM, simplify

When I was at Pooja and Rishi’s wedding a couple of weeks ago, one of my friends mentioned that having the domain sheth.com could be considered valuable. So I decided to test this theory… I’ve setup a completely automated sign-up and setup process for interested parties to buy a sheth.com email address.

For the geek reading this article, this wasn’t very straightforward. I use Zimbra as the email server for sheth.com. Checking to see if a requested email address is available is a relatively easy ldap_search in php. However, it got tricky to automate the creation of Zimbra accounts.  You can learn more about how I did this here.