People who visit my blog instead of reading
it on an RSS aggregator get a couple of nifty extras, including my
task list and a list of e-mail messages sent. It's a personal
experiment I've been running for a while now with unexpectedly
positive results. People have helped me with things on my task list,
and my sent mail list resulted in reminders from two people who
noticed that they hadn't received some messages listed as sent—the
messages had gotten stuck in my mail queue.

These things are easy for me to track because I use
Planner, an
insanely customizable personal information manager for the Emacs text
editor. Today I realized that my list of sent e-mail is a good way to
share the link love and direct you to the websites of the people I
talk to, so I added a bit of code to my config.

On my computer, “E-mail to” is hyperlinked to the actual e-mail, and
names are hyperlinked to their contact records. On the Web, “E-mail
to” is not a hyperlink, and names are hyperlinked to people's blogs or
websites.

It's a little tweak, but who knows what it'll lead to? If you end up
discovering an interesting person through this, way cool. And hey, it
gives people whom I write extra Google juice… =)

I might do the same for the tasks, although that requires a teensy bit
more coding. Hmm.

I'm thinking of listing the subject header again. It'll give people
more of an idea of what other people talk to me about.
Dan Howard was concerned about privacy. I
occasionally delete subjects if I think they're sensitive. Do you
think I might get away with a mostly opt-out system?

Anyway, check out my actual blog every now and then! =)

Emacs Lisp code:

(defun sacha/planner-gnus-track-sent ()
  "Add this to `message-sent-hook' to keep track of messages sent on your daily page.
Result: Adds it to * E-mail sent."
  ;; Grab the header
  (let ((mail-link
         (concat "gnus://" gnus-newsgroup-name "/"
                 (planner-gnus-get-message-id)))
        (addresses
         (split-string (planner-gnus-get-address "To") ", *"))
        text)
    (setq text
          (concat
           (planner-make-link mail-link "E-mail to")
           " "
           (mapconcat
            (lambda (address)
              (let (rec)
                ;; Look up record
                (setq addr (mail-extract-address-components address))
                (setq rec (apply 'bbdb-search-simple addr))
                (if rec
                    (planner-make-link
                     (concat "bbdb://"
                             (planner-replace-regexp-in-string
                              " " "."
                              (bbdb-record-name
                               rec)))
                     (bbdb-record-name rec))
                  (or (car address) (cadr address)))))
            addresses
            ",")))
          ;;            ": "
          ;;           (message-fetch-field "Subject"))))
    (save-window-excursion
      (save-excursion
        (planner-goto-today)
        (planner-seek-to-first "E-mail sent")
        (insert " 1. " text "\n"))))
  nil)

(add-hook 'message-mode-hook
          (lambda ()
            (add-hook 'message-sent-hook 'sacha/planner-gnus-track-sent)))