add an email and sms server to Asana

[Bo_Harris]

Those are all helpful, but none of them address a very, very common situation where the person you are sending email to is not part of your organization and/or your Asana instance. On top of that, people are using so many different kinds of communication, it makes it very easy to lose information.

Look at the layout idea below. If you added an email and sms server to Asana you could do these things:

1. Post notifications on each task for new comments, sms and/or emails.
2. External people would see communication in their email or sms apps, but internal employees would probably still use ‘comments’ as their form of communication. If the external person has Asana, but is not part of the same organization, those could be connected.
3. When external people ‘Reply’ back to an email or SMS, then Asana could AUTOMATICALLY keep all of that communication grouped under each task so it is easy to stay organized.
4. Asana could (and this one would be huge for me) also, remove all the garbage in most email threads and keep it formatted like an sms conversation. There is so, so much stuff repeated in email threads because of the automatic settings to always include the previous emails in replies
5. Then when a task is marked ‘completed’ it goes into the archive and users can always go back and reference it by clearing filters so no information is lost, but it stays easily discoverable and organized. Searching for old emails in outlook and gmail is painful.
6. My example puts the email inside a single task. With a bit of thought I would guess you could do the same thing with a bit more complex situations that have multiple tasks.

Currently people are using either folders or tags to keep stuff like this grouped inside of email apps, but they are clunky at best. SMS doesn’t have any way to keep things organized at all. Someone needs to develop a new communication platform for the current century that actually works for the way people communicate now. It should incorporate other forms of communication like sms, messengers, chat streams, etc. because those are all ways people communicate.

You would CRUSH, CRUSH, CRUSH all other applications out there if you could make a single platform that handles all forms of communication and keeps it organized in one spot. You have some other apps that are right on your heels and frankly cheaper. Adding functionality like this would definitely set you apart from the other guys.

Please, Please don’t just delete this. Steal my idea if you want. I give you all the rights. Show this to your boss and let them show it to their boss.

[Bo_Harris]

Sorry, I attached the wrong file

[Jonathan_Milne]

There’s work being undertaken in this area. Using Gmail and Outlook you can keep Emails synchronised, and you can now also use variables when you send emails. You could use custom fields (include free text) and new manual triggers to achieve most of what you want.
I would suggest adding into your rules something like “add comment 'manual trigger was run and email sent” to know you sent an email
Good Luck!

P.S. I fully support your idea of removing all the garbage things like social media icons etc from becoming attachments. Maybe with all the AI enhancements this will become more likely in time.