Mail: How do I add a new to-do/reminder, like in Snow Leopard?

I have the same problem.

I don't believe this function was just removed without any warning...

Now i have to "downgrade" to Leopard or move to MS Outlook.

I am reluctant to move to Outlook (even though I have it as part of Office 2011) mostly because, although it would solve this feature downgrade problem, it is rather bloated and doesn't intergrate well with sync services. I've just downloaded a free trial of the, on the face of it, overpriced Busycal (you can get it from the App store, too). Busycal doesn't mean that you can create to dos from within mail, but you can drag mails to its to do panel, which you can't do from Lion mail to lion ical (unless you drag it first to the calendar and then drag it again to the reminders).

I've also noticed a number of other featues that make it more useable than the new iCal. It also syncs with all the sync services stuff including, incidentally iCal, so I plan to try it for a little longer before deciding what to do. Who knows Apple may even be planning to add some to do functioanlity back to mail or release a proper scheduling facility as part of iCloud. Please do send them some feedback about your disapointment http://www.apple.com/feedback/mail.html becasue there's no reason to think they'll be tracking this thread unless the number of views and comments grows to something embarrassing.

I agree, creating ToDos directly from mail was really helpfull feature. Now there is no interoperability between mail and iCal in this case. If apple does not put it again into the mail app I will change to ms office.

Drag your email from Mail to a day on the iCal calendar and set youre reminder there.

By dragging the email to a calendear's day a event will be created there, not a reminder. I also tried to drag the email to reminders list but it did not work for me.

once an event is created, by putting the email on the caldendar, you can edit the event to add an alert reminder...along with some detailed features.

Thom and Perik. Helpful answers. Thank you both.

The issue remains though, doesn't it? We used to be able to select some text in a mail, right click it and it would become a task/to do/reminder. We could then set parameters in mail and move on. It was pretty clunky compared to any serious app that's part of a professional scheduling/workflow suite. But it was there, it worked and some people came to depend upon it. It has been removed, which, at very least, is disappointing.

LOL... Apple likes to add up all of the "new features" when pitching their new OS -- many of which we'll never use. But, I've never seen the list of features that "disappear in the night" -- many of which we USED 🙂

But, to be fair -- dragging an email to iCal is only one extra step.

I'm sure someone is working on a Mail plug-in....

-- thom

Hello every one, no more sobbing, you can set an Automator to this for you. Have a look at this website.

Cheers

Thanks for the hint. I am new to the Applescript and it helped me to write the workflow for creating iCal Reminders by executing the workflow directly from context menu. Now a'm able to create them from Mail or Safari apps and the link to the actual message/web sitewill be set automaticaly. That is the thing I always wanted to have 🙂

I created an Automator action that does this for you. It has some extended features to the stock action provided by Apple. Check it out at this website.

-Dave