I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.

AfterMail Quick Links Trick
Posted by rod@drury.net.nz in Old-blog-archives at 9:35 am on Sunday, 31 July 2005

I find that when I’m juggling multiple projects and relationships I often want to do a quick AfterMail search to see - who owes who - an email. 

As AfterMail provides a full view over all Email I can quickly ascertain the From-To conversation.  This differs from normal Outlook as the view can be the entire conversation, not just my inbox and sent items.  AfterMail allows search url’s to be passed in.

http://aftermail/query.aspx?fromto=*@microsoft.com

I thought it would be great to have a number of saved searches on my desktop so I can quickly see a communications flow.

Then last week I saw the Konfabutalor Widgets, which provide those Mac type desktop widgets for Windows.  I thought it would be great to build an AfterMail Widget.  With the team flat out that might mean I had to loose a(nother) weekend.

After looking through the gallery I found a nice RSS reading Widget and thought I could make this work without writing code.

Turned out I could just point to a simple static RSS feed.  An XML file. 

sample.xml

<rss version=”0.91″>
 <channel>
    <title>Quick Links</title>
    <link>http://aftermail</link>
    <description>Quick access to AfterMail</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <lastBuildDate>$now</lastBuildDate>
    <item>
      <title>Apple</title>
      <link>http://aftermail/query.aspx?ToAndFrom=*@apple.com</link>
      <description>Email conversation with Apple</description>
    </item>
    …
 </channel>
</rss>

Trackback uri |