Hi, I have spent quite some time testing this out with little success.
What I am looking to do:
We have a marketing agency. Our account manager creates the task in Asana for a graphic designer. The designer adds the link to the creatives to the task (in description/comment etc). We need this link to be sent out to the client’s email for review. After that we need all the emails in that thread to be posted in the asana tasks as new comments and all new comments to be sent as emails in that thread.
I managed to set up a zap that would send out an email with asana task description to an email which is the task title when a tag is added to the task.
This setup is not optimal though, as we need different task titles in asana. I couldn’t figure how to pull a single piece of data from the task description (zapier allows to use only full description/title as an input). Is it possible?
And I didn’t proceed any further as well. Is it possible to post an email from the thread zapier created as asana comment and upkeep this communication between comments/emails?
Please let me know if my explanation makes sense. Thanks a lot in advance!
Hello @Elizaveta_Gurdzhi,
Welcome to the forums!
It sounds as if your team is running Asana Basic? There are two options to improve the outbound email Zap:
1 - Asana Premium: With Premium you have access to custom fields on tasks, meaning Zapier can easily retrieve just the pieces of data needed.
2 - Asana Basic with extra preparation (error prone): If there is a consistent format used at the start of a new task description, Zapier’s Formatter utility has a “Split Text” tool that could parse out bits of content from the description. I would recommend dedicating the first lines of the description each to a “field”. If a certain character(s) or an emoji is used at the start of each value (with an extra at the end), Zapier would be able to discover the content between them. An example Asana description:
•clientemail@gmail.com
•drive.google.com
•
—
Normal description content…
Another way to do it with a repeating element:
clientemail@gmail.com|drive.google.com|
There isn’t a good option for an ongoing email thread to live as comments in a task. If your company uses Gmail, I do have a way to create a universal hyperlink to an email that would work for anyone included in the discussion. Let me know if you’d like to hear more about this, or if you have any questions on the above.
Regards,
Paul Harren
Hello @Paul.Harren,
Thanks a lot for the Formatter idea, that’s super helpful!
Sure, the hyperlink sounds interesting as well, would be great to learn more about it.
Best,
Liz
Hello @Elizaveta_Gurdzhi,
I am glad my message was helpful.
I use espanso, a free and open-source text expander. If I have an email that I want a link to, I will copy the subject line → focus my cursor in Asana → and input a few keystrokes . . . resulting in:
The link opens this Gmail advanced search:
Essentially I’ve configured espanso to place my current clipboard content into a pattern of text that will produce what is shown above.
The use of a Gmail advanced search URL allows the link work for others (versus using the user-specific URL from your address bar), and the inclusion of the date range helps reduce duplicate emails if the subject line isn’t completely unique.
–Paul
2 Likes
I have found a way to post a new email in thread as a comment to asana task:
- Pick Gmail, add “Find an email” step in Zapier (e.g. via unique Subject that contains Task name)
- optional: use Formatter to decide which part of the email you need to be posted as a comment
- Pick Asana, add “Create a story” step in Zapier and choose which part of the email you need to be posted as a comment
Now more tricky part is to send new comments to specific email thread, looking into that further
