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Configuring Remember The Milk with Outlook 2007

Remember The Milk or RTM is an online task management application that can be configured to send reminders to an e-mail address of your choice a set time before each task is due to be completed. This tutorial will explain how you can set up this reminder service and give some tips on how to use Microsoft Outlook to deal with these e-mails.

Configuring Remember The Milk
After logging in to your account on RTM, click the settings link in the top right corner and go to the reminders tab. Here are my settings:

You can change the time before task is due that the e-mail is sent if you wish, but I wouldn’t recommend making it much shorter than 5 minutes or outlook may not pick it up in time. Of course you’ll have to add your own e-mail address, and make sure the ‘On’ radio button is checked. Click ‘Save Changes’ to update your settings and then open up Outlook to continue…

Configuring Outlook
I’m using outlook 2007 for this tutorial, so if using an earlier version you may find that some steps don’t work or need to be done differently. If this is the case, please add a comment and I’ll try and help you out as best as possible.

First of all we need to set outlook to automatically download our e-mails, to do this go to Tools > Options > ‘Mail Setup’ Tab and click on the Send/Receive… button. Make sure the checkbox highlighted below is selected, and also ensure the time (5 minutes in my example) is less than the time before a task is due that you choose for notifications to be sent from the remember the milk settings panel.

Now we are also going to create a rule in outlook to alert us when an e-mail notification comes in and file the e-mail in a specified folder.
Go to Tools > Rules and Alerts, then click the ‘New Rule’ button.
Choose ‘Display mail from someone in the New Alert Window’ under the ‘Stay Up to Date’ sub heading, and click ‘Next’.
Tick the ‘From people or distribution list’ box, as shown in the screenshot below:

Then in the ‘Step 2′ box click the ‘People or distribution list’ link, and enter ‘remind@rememberthemilk.com’ as the email address like this:

Click ‘Next’ and fill in the next step like this:

In the ‘Step 2′ box at bottom, click ‘a specific message’ and enter the message as ‘Remember The Milk Reminder’.
The click ‘a sound’ from the line ‘play a sound’ and choose the file ‘Windows Notify.wav’
Then click ’specified’ from the line ‘move it to a specified folder’ and select whatever folder you want, personally I just created a folder called ‘Remember The Milk Notifications’.

Click ‘Next’ to go to the next step

We don’t need any exceptions so just click ‘Next’ again to skip through this step.

Give the rule whatever name you want, preferably something descriptive, make sure the ‘Turn on this rule’ box is checked, and click finish.

And you’re done!

Now when a notification comes through from RTM, a notification box like this should pop up:

Click close, and it will automatically put in the folder you specified.

And that’s one example of how to configure outlook and RTM to receive desktop alerts through e-mails, if you have any problems please add a comment I’ll try and help you.