Hello All,
A new rule has been added recently in Asana to send outlook email as an action.
The email would come from my email address.
My question is: can we control the email address of the sender?
In my workflows, I don’t want the automated outlook email to be received from my email account.
Any thoughts on that?
If you want to control who the sender is, that is the user who should create the rule!
Are you wanting the rule to allow a variable sender? I’m not sure that’s possible right now.
Thank you @Kelsea_Lopez for your reply.
I know that, as workaround solution, we need to create a special user who creates the rules. But what I need is to put the email address that I want, because if I want to create this workflow to be used by external users, I don’t want the email to be sent from my name.
I know that it is not possible right now… this is why I put my request in the Product feedback. I hope to get more votes on it and see it implemented soon.
Thanks again.
We are having a similar issue with this feature. In our case the person who authorizes the O365 account becomes the default person to send the emails out making the feature unusable in our organization
Just to clarify and echo @Ewen_MacKillop, the email will come from the Outlook account of the person who authenticates to the external integration, not necessarily the person who creates the rule. That is, Mary Jones might set up the external rule action in a given project and authenticate to her O365 account; John Smith may then come in later and create a rule in that project which sends an Outlook email; in this case the email will come from Mary Jones, not John Smith.
In our case, we are using this feature to automate and simplify form submissions for external users. For example, when someone submits a form (generated through Asana) a task is created and actioned on by a specific team (HR, Finance, etc). When the task is completed, we are asking Asana to send the form submitter an email letting them know their submission has been completed.
We would prefer that the email be generated through an alias email (example: finance@companyname.com) instead of the person who has authenticates the integration. We have a workaround in place but it uses up a license that we could be using for someone else.
FYI there’s really no way technically that Asana can do what this thread is asking for. Because the email is being sent from the actual Outlook (or Gmail) account of the authenticated user and Asana doesn’t have control of the user’s email domain, Asana can’t send it from someone’s else’s account or email address, as Microsoft (or Google) would not allow that. Otherwise I could send an email from, say, beyonce@gmail.com (just kidding, I don’t know if that’s a valid address or not).
Even if it were possible technically, it would create usability and ethical issues. In terms of usability, it would increase the chances of such an email being marked as spam. Ethically, well, just take my above “beyonce” example! 
Hello Asana Team,
I’m writing to suggest an enhancement for Asana’s integration with Gmail, specifically for customizing the “From” email address in notifications triggered by rules.
Current Behavior: When setting up a rule to send email notifications via Gmail, the “From” field is automatically set to the account of the rule creator. This approach limits flexibility because:
Example Use Case: In ticketing systems, emails should ideally be sent from a team-based address, like “support@company.com” or “tickets@company.com”, rather than from the individual who set up the rule. Currently, achieving this requires creating a new user account for the generic email, which is not always ideal and complicates task ownership.
Suggested Improvement: Please allow customization of the “From” email address in Gmail notifications triggered by rules, similar to how “Reply-To” can be set to the task assignee. This would make the feature much more versatile, especially for workflows where the task owner might change frequently but the sender identity should remain consistent.
Thank you for considering this improvement to make Asana’s Gmail integration even more robust!
Best regards,
Timothy
This isn’t technically true. Microsoft allows this with the graph api and I suspect Google allows the same.
As long as proper permissions are set on the service providers end, it’s allowed and easy to configure. In this situation, nothing really changes from the Asana end-users end because Asana is not actually sending the email. The email is generated by Asana but is sent by the Microsoft/Google API instead. All that Asana needs to do is specify the sender address in the API request, but it seems that Asana has just decided not to utilize it.
It really doesn’t create any usability or ethical issues for the end-user when it’s designed correctly.
As other’s have pointed out in this forum - the current integration is poorly designed. I send many emails to my colleagues throughout the day and there should be a clear distinction between those emails and emails that are sent by Asana. Plus, since Asana uses the API the emails are sent from my own individual account even though the content is generated by Asana. This means there are no reasonable ways to separate Asana emails and my own emails by rules or connectors in Microsoft Exchange.
@Daniel_Wiser The “from” email address still has to be one that’s allowed to be sent by the authenticated MS365 or Gmail user, it’s important for people to understand that you can’t just send from any arbitrary email address.
But you’re right that technically, both services provide the ability to configure an account such that additional email addresses can be set up via delegation permissions as authorized to send from.
It would be more work to implement such a solution - if I were designing it, I would say that Asana would need to get a list of the authorized delegate mailboxes (there are API calls in both the MS and Google APIs to do this), display those to the user in a dropdown list and let them select the one to send from for that rule. But you’re right that AFAIK it should be technically feasible to implement such a solution.
(Hmmm maybe this is something I should add to Flowsana… )
Kelsea,
I find that to be an interesting reply, we don’t want the email to come from any specific user, we want it to come from an email address that is specifically not an Asana user, such as AsanaUpdates@blank.com. It kind of feels like we are using an Enterprise license to do a workaround that is already common in most modern apps.
Thanks!
Hi Lauren. We are trying to use this workaround and it’s not working for us. Do you have any tips on how you had this work for you?
Hi Tracy,
As others have indicated above, this workaround did not end up working for us as it only authenticates my Outlook email. It is something I hope is able to be fixed in the future as “I” end up sending anywhere from 50-100 Asana emails that I would love to redirect.
That’s exactly what we are working through right now. We may have a workaround that we are testing with our external IT company but I know realistically we may be stuck. Thanks for the response! If we are successful with our IT company, I will let you know!
Hi Lauren,
We were able to figure this out today with our Tech team. I tested the emails and it’s working! If you want any of our tips and tricks, please let me know! I am happy to help - and happy that the hundreds of emails coming from me are done 
Hi Tracy,
Happy New Year!
Could you please explain how you addressed the issue including relevant tips and tricks? Thank you.
Hi Vama! Happy New Year! Happy to help!
It can be a little tedious to switch accounts back and forth to work on rules, but it was worth the work considering we use Asana for a company-wide IT Help Desk. My manager and I both have access to the Asana account and the Outlook mailbox. We check the mailbox often just to ensure the outgoing emails are being sent and that the rules are working.
Please note that this is not a free workaround as this generic user account takes up full licenses in both Asana and Outlook. I think there are 3rd parties that may be able to help do this as well, but we wanted to find a solution using just Asana and Outlook at this time.
I hope this helps. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out!
Great write-up; thank you for posting that!
As an option, this can be made easier by clicking your Chrome profile image (top right corner) then choosing Add Chrome Profile from the menu and it’s essentially having another persona in Chrome to use as you like, simultaneously with your main profile if desired.
Thanks,
Larry
Thank you, Tracy.
This is very helpful.
You’re welcome!