Automatic forwarding to ASANA from Google groups account for creating tasks

Hi,

My team is working with a collaborative inbox in Google groups. We would like to use ASANA by automatic forwarding incoming emails from the group inbox to ASANA. I have added the group email address to the ASANA project, and added the ASANA forwarding email address as a member to our Google group inbox. However, automatic forwarding still does not work.
This is probably because the initial sender of the email is not part of our ASANA project.

Some background information. My team is handling incoming requests about our products, these requests are send to our google group email address. So we receive emails in our group inbox from a lot of different people, therefore we can not make them a member of our ASANA project.

Is there any way to get the emails from our google group inbox automatic forwarded and that a task is created in ASANA?

Thank you in advance for your feedback.

Hi @Liselotte_den_ouden

In my case, forwarding to Asana only works from email addresses that are associated with our organisation. So, I can only forward using my work email, not from my personal Gmail account.

How are you set up in Asana? Are you an organisation or workspace?

Hi Mark,

Thank you for your reply.
Our ASANA team is part of an organization. The people that send requests to our general inbox are part of our organization as well (they have the same type of email address), but they are not part of our team or the project in ASANA.

Hi again

As I understand it, Asana recognises members of your organisation based on your email domain. Forwarding to Asana will only work from email addresses that share that domain, so that would explain why your Gmail inbox isn’t working.

The easiest solution would be to contact your Customer Success person at Asana and ask them to associate that Gmail address with your organisation. We recently had to do this when we acquired a separate organisation and some of our colleagues had different email domains.

The more complicated solution would be to set up a rule in Gmail that forwarded all emails to a recognised email address (yours, for example), then another rule to automatically forward those to the relevant projects.

Or you might be able to use Zapier, though I have to admit I’ve never used it myself, so my knowledge is limited.

A final option might be to wait until @James_Carl has finished developing Sendana for Gmail. He’d be able to tell you more about that.

Hope you get it sorted out!

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Yes! This is amazing! Our Onboardify team just added a new feature to our app that is just for this use case! Our product is called Dossier, and it’s the 4th app on Asana Apps Communications category. Here is a post about it:

Use Mailboxes to respond to group email – in Asana

Now, with Dossier’s new Mailbox role, you can add service workflow to any service email mailbox—such as support@, helpdesk@, design@, etc. All incoming emails to these addresses can be assigned to team members, people removed or added, emails automatically moved to Open and Replied stages, and finally closed.

With Dossier Mailboxes, incoming emails can also be automatically sent to task management tools like Asana and Slack, where you can manage your service requests. You can then use Asana or Slack to manage these requests, as well as your communication app to respond to all email requests, just like you would with an email app.

What you do is to eliminate the “group email” (and the terrible, terrible, inbox cluttering awfulness that comes with it). When your product team receives a request in a Mailbox email (in Gmail), it instantly gets sent to Asana.

Signup and connect your Asana account at http://www.dossier.work. Since this is a new feature, we’re happy to help you use it if you sign up and contact us. While you’re at it, there’s a video of how emails work with Asana:

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hey Liselotte I just wanted to advise you can certainly do this if you haven’t already figured this out.

Here is a simple way to do this via Google Groups → https://www.shooshmonkey.com/help/forward-emails-to-asana

basically create a google group eg. todo at yourdomain.com and register that with Asana, then everyone emails that group.

I have a more elaborate way of doing this via Advanced Email Routing in the Google admin console (each client emails help at shooshmonkey.com and their emails go to their own team) keeping a single group name and allowing different people to email different teams.

Happy to write up how I did that if you’re interested. Hope this helps you and anyone else.

@Kris_Hogh Do your routing settings still work? My understanding was Asana won’t accept them anymore because of a mismatch between who’s server/domain is listed in the original’s mail headers and what’s added/changed by G Suite. If you could share those settings I would appreciate it very much indeed. Neither Asana’s nor Google’s Support have been able to help me with this.

I went for a workaround on account level like you’ve described it above. Compare: Google Corporate Groups Fowarding Emails … but I’d still love to be able to do this on domain level.

Thanks in advance
Daniel

Hi Kris,

We have created an automatic forwarding rule from our customer service email to asana so tasks coming from unknown users emails are created automatically. And this works but inmediately a second task is created to infomr that some of the users are not part of the organisation (these are obviously our customers). Do you know how we could avoid this annoying notifications? Thanks a lot!

Hi @Daniel_Kreiss,

Sorry for the delay. The sender doesn’t change, only the recipient address so yes it still works. You can modify the headers using the Gmail advanced routing but it’s not necessary in my example above. I’ll share those settings with you later today in that post.

I just created an email demonstrating how I did this in our G Suite domain, and to clarify the external users that send emails need to be associated with my organisation or they get an email but the tasks still go through to the correct project:

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