The updated EmailImport Addon is now available for download from the GTD-PHP Trac wiki.

I have since moved on to the next most important feature on my personal list of Enhancements (yes, before I fix my known bug in the previous one). I want to be able to have a scheduled email sent every morning with a report on what Actions are overdue, what actions are due today and a rundown on the coming actions in the next week. Additionally this report should contain information on Project deadlines of note (overdue, due and coming). Another report I want is to be able to have the weekly review report emailed weekly to myself (at my work and home email addresses).

To achieve this I have been looking in to using php scripts to create cron jobs on the host system (or schtasks jobs if on a WAMP server for example). I have most of the information required to achieve this now. Once I have implemented a scheduled tasks manager from within GTD-PHP I will then build a custom report builder, which will then be enhanced by the emailer. In all, three addons become interlocked for completing this next feature.

If I didn’t have GTD-PHP (and therefore wasn’t following the GTD methodology) to manage all my projects I probably would not be in the position of even being capable of extending any project (I am busier now than ever, but I have more control over my time than ever before). By completing the Addons in my list I will have so much better control over my time and be in a perfect position to achieve some Zen in my life .

Just so you get some perspective, when I first set up GTD-PHP I added a lot of actions, and immediately closed them. Those statistics had me max at about 30 items in a week. Currently this week I have closed 75 items, and the week isn’t over. Most of these items have been self imposed actions for me to develop, research, repair, investigate, or whatever. I have given myself more work than at the start, and I have more time off now to blog about it (yet another action) than I have ever had previously.

I thoroughly encourage everybody to look into David Allens Getting Things Done. Worked wonders for me

Cheers, Chris.

GroupWise decides it wants to MIME Encode the email, which brings about my first problem. I need to account for multiple MIME Parts. After resolving this my next issue is that the corporate email gateway decides to append a massive disclaimer at the bottom of the email, bloating my item by at least 1000%. So I implemented the ability to cut out disclaimers based on a stripos call. I can have a list of different filters here and it will cut them all out.

After fixing this up and resolving the functional issues I logged this addon as a ticket in the GTD-PHP Trac system.

I have a few further updates to make, including having bulk uploads, custom tags and mail filters.

Cheers, Chris

Being the kind of person who likes to adapt, change, and implement better solutions, particularly for myself, I created a list of features I would like to see in my GTD-PHP installation. One of the first problems I had with the existing system was that it does not support importing Inbox items from a real mail Inbox.

I did some research and came across an existing mail importer, however this required directly piping mail from SMTP into the php script, which I could not do on my host (or would prefer not to do).

I decided to build my own POP3 Importer of Inbox items and decided to learn PHP and imap_open. I built it as an addon to GTD-PHP that could be called to do an import, however I am still going to extend it so that in the GTD-PHP header additional headers can be called (ones that identify if new items have been added to an Inbox so I can get feedback of when somebody mails into that account).

<?php
//Script to insert e-mails into GTD-PHP inbox.
//These are loaded from a pop3 account
//The account info and other options are configured in the config.php file
//$config['addons']['pop3inbox']=array(
//        "link"=>"addons/pop3inbox/import.php",
//        'title'=>"Import POP3 Mail", 'label'=>"Import Inbox",
//        'where'=>'item.php?type=i','when'=>'after',
//        'options'=>array("user"   => 'gtduser',
//                         "pass"   => 'gtdpass',
//                         "server" => 'mail.server.com',
//                         "port"   => '995',
//                         "type"   => '/pop3/ssl/novalidate-cert',
//                         "delete" => true)
//                         );
//Subject becomes title
//From & Body becomes description
$title='Import POP3 Inbox';
include_once 'header.php';
 
$msoptions = $addon['options'];
 
mysql_connect($config['host'],$config['user'],$config['pass']);
mysql_select_db($config['db']);
 
$imap = imap_open("{".$msoptions['server'].":".$msoptions['port'].$msoptions['type']."}INBOX", $msoptions['user'], $msoptions['pass']);
if (!$imap) {
   print_r(imap_errors());
} else {
  $num_msg = imap_num_msg($imap);
  include_once('gtdfuncs.php'); 
  echo "importing ".$num_msg." messages<br>";
  echo "<div class='success'>\n";
  for ($i = $num_msg; $i > 0; $i--)
  {
    // empty vars
    $from = "";
    $subject = "";
    $headers = "";
    $message = "";
 
    $header = imap_headerinfo($imap, $i, 80, 80);
 
    $from = $header->fromaddress;
    $subject = $header->fetchsubject;
    $date    = date('YmdHis', $header->udate);
 
    $message=imap_body($imap, $i);
    $message="From: ".$from."\n\n".$message;
 
    mysql_query("INSERT INTO `".$config['prefix']."items` ( `itemId` , `title` , `description` , `desiredOutcome` )VALUES (NULL , '$subject', '$message', NULL);");
  mysql_query("INSERT INTO `".$config['prefix']."itemstatus` (`itemId`, `dateCreated`, `lastModified`, `dateCompleted`) VALUES (NULL, '".date($config["datemask"])."', NOW(), NULL);");
    mysql_query("INSERT INTO `".$config['prefix']."itemattributes` ( `itemId` , `type` , `isSomeday` , `categoryId` , `contextId` , `timeframeId` , `deadline` , `repeat` , `suppress` , `suppressUntil` )VALUES (NULL , 'i', 'n', '0', '0', '0', NULL , '0', 'n', NULL);");
 
    echo "Imported '".stripslashes(escapeChars($subject)),"' into Inbox<br />\n";
    if ($msoptions['delete'])
      imap_delete($imap, $i);
  }
  echo "</div>";
  if ($msoptions['delete'])
    imap_expunge($imap);
  imap_close($imap);
}
include_once 'footer.php';
?>

Works pretty well at this point. Though I am having problems getting mail into that POP3 account. Will have to work further on that today

Cheers, Chris.