Hi everyone,
I’m an enthusiastic Asana user for many years now, but always just for my own tasks.
My work relies HEAVILY on emails (I’d love to see that change to working in collaboration tools, but that’s not going to happen anytime soon -long story but it’s part of the nature of my job).
I’ve been using the Asana Outlook Add-in since it’s launch to quickly create tasks from emails if I can’t respond straight away. Almost everytime the task results in me having to respond to said emails. The one thing I’ve been struggling with all that time is there’s no easy way to get back to an email you’ve created a task from. Not in Outlook, that is.
I’ve discovered that the Gmail add-in creates a comment with the email containing a hyperlink back to the original email. The Outlook add-in does not, it only creates a comment with the contents of the email.
I’ve seriously considered switching to MS To Do for some while especially for this functionality: the way it automatically creates a task with a link to open the email when flagging an email in Outlook is perfect. I’ve gone back to Asana because I can manage my projects better here, but the hassle of getting back to an email I’ve created a task from bugs me even more after that.
I would love to be able to just work from Asana, open a task that requires me to respond to an e-mail, click a link to get to that e-mail in the browser, respond, get back and complete the task. No distractions from new messages in inbox, no searching for the email I need to respond to.
How do you all manage emails and Asana? Do you have any tips on how to create a workflow on tasks from emails with less hassle, less clicks, less distractions?
Thanks for your help!
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Hi,
I answer an email right away or that becomes a task by forwarding the email to x@mail.asana.com. If I need to answer the email later, I find it by using the search on my email client. Not ideal but that works ok.
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Hi @Marjolein_Wijnker, welcome to the Asana Community Forum 
Great tip, @Bastien_Siebman!
I would suggest forwarding the email to x@mail.asana.com and including the URL link in the email body. That way, when you open the email as a task in Asana the link is right there for you!
You can click the link, the email will open in a new tab, you can respond and get straight back to Asana without having to see you whole email inbox and get distracted 
I hope this helps
Thank you very much @Rebecca_McGrath and @Bastien_Siebman for your suggestions.
It’s interesting that you both prefer forwarding the email over the add-in. Maybe you just don’t work with Outlook or Gmail, but if you do: what are the pros of forwarding over the add-in for you?
I find that with forwarding, the description field easily gets very long and cluttered with the content of the email, especially if it’s a thread.
The suggestion of just pasting the url unfortunately doesn’t work for Outlook. When the mail is moved or archived, the link doesn’t work anymore and just gets you to the inbox. MS To Do seems to create a deeplink to the email wherever it resides, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to access such links in Outlook on the Web.
I think I wish the Outlook add-in would just result in the same sort of comment-card that the Gmail add-in and Asana for Teams create, containing a link to the original message. Is there any reason, any technical limitation the Outlook Add-in works differently? Or is it worth raising a product feedback for this?
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