How to Integrate Bolt.new with OmniFocus

Before building anything, it is important to understand exactly what is and is not possible with OmniFocus in a web context. OmniFocus has no REST API, no webhooks, no OAuth flow, and no publicly accessible data endpoints. The only integration mechanism that works from a web server is Mail Drop. To find your Mail Drop address, open OmniFocus on macOS or iOS and navigate to Settings (gear icon) → Sync → Mail Drop. You will see a unique email address like yourname-xyz123@sync.omnigroup.com. Any email sent to this address with a valid format creates a task in your OmniFocus Inbox. Mail Drop requires an OmniFocus Pro subscription — it is not available on the Standard plan. The Mail Drop format is simple: the email Subject line becomes the task name. Optionally, you can append special identifiers to the subject in the format '-- identifier value' to set the project and context. The email body becomes the task's Note field. There is no way to set a due date through Mail Drop syntax alone — you can include the due date in the task notes and process it manually in OmniFocus later. Keep in mind the significant limitations of Mail Drop: tasks always arrive in the OmniFocus Inbox regardless of subject formatting, there is a short delay (usually under a minute) between sending and receiving, you cannot read back task status, and there is no confirmation that a task was created. For one-way task capture this is sufficient; for anything more sophisticated, consider the Supabase-based alternative described in the subsequent steps.

1// .env.local
2OMNIFOCUS_MAILDROP_EMAIL=yourname-xyz123@sync.omnigroup.com
3SENDGRID_API_KEY=SG.your_sendgrid_api_key
4SENDGRID_FROM_EMAIL=noreply@yourdomain.com

With SendGrid (or any transactional email service), you can send a formatted email to the OmniFocus Mail Drop address from a Next.js API route. The task name goes in the email Subject, and any notes go in the plain text email body. OmniFocus processes the email and creates the task in your Inbox, usually within 30-60 seconds. Install the SendGrid Node.js library by prompting Bolt: 'Install @sendgrid/mail package'. The library provides a clean API wrapper around SendGrid's v3 mail send endpoint. Alternatively, you can use Resend (resend.com) which has an even simpler API and a generous free tier of 3,000 emails per month. The API route below accepts a task name and optional notes via POST, then sends a formatted email to the Mail Drop address. Notice that the 'from' email must be a verified sender in your SendGrid account — SendGrid blocks emails from unverified senders. Verify your sender email in the SendGrid dashboard under Settings → Sender Authentication. Because this integration sends outbound HTTP requests to the SendGrid API, it works perfectly in Bolt's WebContainer preview during development. You can test task creation from your local Bolt environment without deploying — the email will be sent and the task will appear in OmniFocus. You do not need incoming webhooks for this approach since OmniFocus does not send any callbacks.

1// app/api/omnifocus/create-task/route.ts
2import { NextRequest, NextResponse } from 'next/server';
3
4const MAILDROP_EMAIL = process.env.OMNIFOCUS_MAILDROP_EMAIL ?? '';
5const SENDGRID_API_KEY = process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY ?? '';
6const FROM_EMAIL = process.env.SENDGRID_FROM_EMAIL ?? '';
7
8export async function POST(request: NextRequest) {
9  const { taskName, notes, project } = await request.json();
10
11  if (!taskName || typeof taskName !== 'string' || taskName.trim() === '') {
12    return NextResponse.json({ error: 'taskName is required' }, { status: 400 });
13  }
14
15  // OmniFocus Mail Drop: subject = task name, body = notes
16  const subject = project
17    ? `${taskName.trim()} @${project.trim()}`
18    : taskName.trim();
19
20  const emailBody = {
21    personalizations: [{ to: [{ email: MAILDROP_EMAIL }] }],
22    from: { email: FROM_EMAIL },
23    subject,
24    content: [
25      {
26        type: 'text/plain',
27        value: notes ? notes.trim() : `Task created from Bolt app at ${new Date().toISOString()}`,
28      },
29    ],
30  };
31
32  const response = await fetch('https://api.sendgrid.com/v3/mail/send', {
33    method: 'POST',
34    headers: {
35      Authorization: `Bearer ${SENDGRID_API_KEY}`,
36      'Content-Type': 'application/json',
37    },
38    body: JSON.stringify(emailBody),
39  });
40
41  // SendGrid returns 202 Accepted with no body on success
42  if (response.status !== 202) {
43    const error = await response.json().catch(() => ({ message: 'Unknown SendGrid error' }));
44    return NextResponse.json({ error }, { status: response.status });
45  }
46
47  return NextResponse.json({ success: true, message: 'Task sent to OmniFocus via Mail Drop' });
48}

For use cases that require more than one-way task capture — reading tasks back, updating statuses, building dashboards, sharing tasks with team members, or accessing tasks from non-Apple devices — building a GTD task manager directly in Bolt with Supabase is significantly more capable than trying to work around OmniFocus's limitations. GTD methodology requires four key entities in your database: a task with its title, notes, project, context (area of responsibility or physical location), defer date (when it becomes actionable), due date (when it must be done), and status (inbox, active, waiting, someday, or done). Supabase's PostgreSQL provides all the query capabilities you need: filter by status, sort by defer date, find tasks due today, and calculate weekly review items. The schema below creates a tasks table with Row Level Security enabled so each user only sees their own tasks. This uses Supabase Auth — when you prompt Bolt to create this, it will automatically wire up the authenticated user's ID to the user_id column via RLS policies. The inbox status is key to GTD: new tasks start in the inbox, and during processing sessions you assign project, context, and dates to move them to active. With Supabase as your backend, you get full read/write API access to your task data from any browser or device, webhook support through Supabase's realtime subscriptions, and none of OmniFocus's Apple-ecosystem restrictions. This approach also works entirely within Bolt's WebContainer during development since Supabase uses HTTP-based communication, not raw TCP sockets.

1-- Supabase SQL: GTD tasks table with RLS
2CREATE TABLE tasks (
3  id UUID DEFAULT gen_random_uuid() PRIMARY KEY,
4  user_id UUID REFERENCES auth.users(id) ON DELETE CASCADE NOT NULL,
5  title TEXT NOT NULL,
6  notes TEXT,
7  project TEXT,
8  context TEXT,
9  defer_date DATE,
10  due_date DATE,
11  status TEXT DEFAULT 'inbox' CHECK (status IN ('inbox','active','waiting','someday','done')),
12  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT now()
13);
14
15ALTER TABLE tasks ENABLE ROW LEVEL SECURITY;
16
17CREATE POLICY "Users manage own tasks"
18  ON tasks FOR ALL
19  USING (auth.uid() = user_id)
20  WITH CHECK (auth.uid() = user_id);
21
22-- Index for common queries
23CREATE INDEX idx_tasks_user_status ON tasks (user_id, status);
24CREATE INDEX idx_tasks_due_date ON tasks (user_id, due_date) WHERE status != 'done';

Deploying your Bolt app — whether you chose the Mail Drop approach or the Supabase GTD approach — follows the same process. Click the Publish button in Bolt's top-right corner to deploy to Netlify's infrastructure, or use the GitHub integration (push code to a repository, then connect to Vercel) for CI/CD deployment. For the Mail Drop approach, no additional configuration is needed after deployment beyond ensuring OMNIFOCUS_MAILDROP_EMAIL, SENDGRID_API_KEY, and SENDGRID_FROM_EMAIL are set as environment variables in Netlify's site settings (not just in your local .env.local). In Netlify: Site Settings → Environment Variables → Add variable. Redeploy after adding variables for them to take effect. For the Supabase GTD approach, add your NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_URL and NEXT_PUBLIC_SUPABASE_ANON_KEY to the hosting platform's environment variables. These can safely use the NEXT_PUBLIC_ prefix since Supabase anon keys are designed to be public (Row Level Security provides the actual authorization). If you are evaluating a long-term OmniFocus replacement with full API access, Todoist is the closest match: it supports GTD-style inbox processing, projects, labels (equivalent to contexts), priorities, and natural language date parsing via a clean REST API. The Todoist API lets you read tasks back, build dashboards, and create automations that OmniFocus's Mail Drop approach cannot support. The Bolt + Todoist integration page covers the complete setup — if GTD workflows are important to your app, that integration path offers everything OmniFocus does with full programmatic control. Note that incoming webhooks — whether from OmniFocus (which does not have them) or from external services notifying your app — cannot be received in Bolt's WebContainer development environment. After deploying to Netlify or Vercel, your app gets a public URL that can receive webhook payloads from any service that supports them.

1// app/api/health/route.ts
2import { NextResponse } from 'next/server';
3
4export async function GET() {
5  const config = {
6    mailDropConfigured: Boolean(process.env.OMNIFOCUS_MAILDROP_EMAIL),
7    sendgridConfigured: Boolean(process.env.SENDGRID_API_KEY),
8    fromEmailConfigured: Boolean(process.env.SENDGRID_FROM_EMAIL),
9  };
10
11  const allConfigured = Object.values(config).every(Boolean);
12
13  return NextResponse.json({
14    status: allConfigured ? 'ok' : 'misconfigured',
15    config,
16  }, { status: allConfigured ? 200 : 503 });
17}