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Dear Lifehacker,
I forward emails to Remember the Milk to create followup reminders, but they always end up in the inbox. Is there any way I can put them into a different list?

Sincerely,
Following Up

Dear Following Up,

You can do more than just send emails to create a task on a specific list—you can also set the due date, tags, priority, or even make repeat using these instructions from the Remember the Milk help section.

Simply forward your email to your specially formatted secret email address found in the RTM settings panel, and then add any one of the following lines to the beginning of the message body to set the task parameters:

Priority: 1
Due: Monday at 9am
Repeat: Every Week
Estimate: 2 hours
Tags: report coffee
List: Followup
––-
This is a heading for the first note.
––-

The key is to end your list with 3 dashes, to signify to RTM that everything below should be considered a note—and keep in mind that the subject line will be the name of the task in RTM.

Since typing all of that every time you want to forward an email would get really tedious, you can use Lifehacker’s own text substitution utility Texter to do most of the typing for you. Just create a new hotstring similar to this one, which will insert the text anywhere you type “fup1″ and hit the tab key:

The magic piece of text in this hotstring is the %| bit, which will place your cursor right at that location once the text has been inserted—in this example the cursor is left right where the due date is so you can easily type in a date (like "next friday").

You could (and should) add in your own set of options to the Texter hotstrings, or you could even create multiple pre-defined hotstrings for common followup text. Note that sometimes rich text formatting in your email client will confuse Remember the Milk’s parser, so you may want to stick with plain text if possible.

Update: As marness points out in the comments, you can also create custom signatures or something like Outlook’s quick parts in your email client to accomplish the same thing without extra software. Thanks!

Love and Geekery,

Lifehacker