Filterable Activity Emails

I get a lot of email from Asana, and some are more important to me than others. I really want to see new comments on tasks, especially if I’m tagged in the comment. But if someone changes the due date, or moves a task to a new column in a board, that’s less urgent.

I would like to be able to use gmail filters to put some notifications at the top of my inbox, and bury others. But Asana makes this hard to do because the emails all look the same - there doesn’t seem to be a foolproof way to identify what type of notification it is. They all have “Assigned to You” in the subject, and a very similar format.

What would really help would be something in the header or body that would clearly identify what prompted the notification. So this could be something like:

  • “Notification: New Comment”
  • “Notification: Due Date Changed”
  • etc.

Then it would be straightforward to create whatever email filters I wanted based on this.

Thanks!

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Agreed. I currently have my email notifications turned off because I can’t sift through them to weed out the important ones. Asana notification emails literally filled up my inbox. Right now, I just manually click on my Asana Inbox and quickly scan the messages there. @Matthew 's suggestion is a good one; in fact, I do the same things with emails I send to colleagues: I create a consistent subject line for the particular thread or topic so that they are easily searchable (or filterable) if one ever needs to refer back to it.

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Looking for the same, some more identifying information in the notification emails that can then allow me to filter them into specific folders, etc.

For instance, I’d like to [be given the option to] include the Team Name somewhere so that I can fire them into the appropriate folders in Outlook.

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This would be a great workaround. Even better in conjunction with more granular notification settings within Asana.

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Can you make updates to the the email notification settings? The 3 options that are curently there are very limiting for customization.

I don’t need daily summaries or weekly reports BUT I do need activity updates. I just wish there were options on what type of activity updates and not just ALL of them. I would prefer if I only got emails on tasks I’ve been specifically assigned and tagged in and that’s in. It would save me from receiving unnecessary updates on tasks. Is there any updates on this moving forward? I’ve been on Asana for over a year now and still haven’t seen this feature updated.

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Hi @Vivian_Ritter and welcome to the Forum! Thanks for sharing your feedback with us :slight_smile:

We already have a conversation on this topic, so i’ve gone ahead and merged your post with the existing thread to gather all feedback and votes in one place. I’ll make sure to update this thread as soon as I have an update on my end; in the meantime have a great Monday!

Currently the “Send me email notifications for:” setting only has three options:

  1. Activity updates
    a. New tasks assigned to you, @mentions, and completion notifications for tasks you’re a collaborator on
  2. Daily summaries
  3. Weekly reports

As an Asana user that is connected to numerous tasks in Asana,
I want the ability to further limit the individual Activity Updates that create email notifications,
So that I am not receiving too many emails,
And can be productive using Asana.

Assumptions:

  1. Once I am assigned to a task or am mentioned in a task I become a ‘follower’ of that task.
  2. Followers of tasks receive all of the email notifications for that task moving forward - regardless of whether or not they are mentioned in the task or if the task is assigned to them.
  3. Many times my involvement in a task is limited and I only need to address concerns when I am actually mentioned in the task.
  4. Once one email comes out and responses are issued from there, many email clients (such as gmail) clump the email thread together. This makes tracking a conversation easier, however, when many unwanted emails are sent in the thread becomes long and overwhelming and important action items such as mentions can be lost. While email clumping is a email client function, Asana should take this into account as these are the platforms their users are using for work.

Acceptance criteria:

  1. Within the Activity Update Email Notification setting, allow a user to select individual actions (such as being mentioned in a task) to trigger an email notification. The user should not have to receive email notifications for ALL activities associated to a task in which they are following.

Thank you!

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Welcome to the Forum @Amy_Catalino and thank you for sharing your feedback with us!

Please note I’ve slightly edited the title of this thread to make it more discoverable for other users to upvote. I hope it’s OK. I would also encourage you to cast your vote by clicking on the vote button next to the title! :slight_smile:

Have a nice day Amy!

I’m popping over here from the “More Options for Email Notifications” thread that got split up, since this one is the most important for us! Getting more granularity within the email notification options is definitely needed for my team and would improve both our productivity and our communication. The “activity updates” in particular could be broken up into multiple options.

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Has this been solved for yet? I just got onboarded by a client to do freelance with them and the onslaught has been disastrous. Every single day I get ~70 super granular emails about things that are totally irrelevant and it’s caused me to miss critical emails from other clients.

I’ve turned email notifications off because missing out on work for one client is better than for all of them, but even if my schedule allowed me to take time out of my day every single day to check in on them, this extra time would likely double my monthly hours with them and they can’t afford that.

Please tell me there’s a solution and where I can find it!

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I think this is a separate topic than having email subject lines that you can filter. It would be great to have more detailed email options in Asana so that you don’t have to spend the extra time to figure out what your email filters should be in whatever email app you use.

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Echoing that here again. These email settings are the only thing I dislike about Asana. It’s very time consuming and easy to make mistakes with the current email system. I’d say at least once a week I miss a comment due to the email title structure (And current email filter settings, which is another topic but similar). The structure of the email titles would be better if they began with the less obvious. I know I’m assigned whatever task I am receiving email notifications on, so I don’t need to see that in bold letters. The most important thing to lead with is what type of activity the email notification is.
For example:

  • Newly assigned task from @teammember: “task title” in (xyz project name)
  • New comment from @teammember on (xyz task name)
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Could anyone offer some guidance on how I can make Asana notification emails filter direct to a specific Outlook folder for the agent I’ve assigned the file. For example…
-My current project is utility-related with 1000 property owners to contact and present documents
-I have 15 people working with me on this project: 3 document people, 1 PM, 11 agents
-When documents are created & QC’d for each property owner it gets assigned to me
-I then assign the document/property owner file to 1 agent

-I’ve tried making a rule in Outlook for each person on my team so whatever the notification is, the email goes to that Outlook folder, for example: agent 1,2,3, etc.
-Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to figure it out…when I try running the rule ALL (a couple thousand) emails are then transferred.

My goal is to track the progress of each agent out working in the field and making sure they’re completing tasks and moving forward with the project. I’ve made a tracker in Asana to keep tabs on progress but it’s time-consuming and would be wayyyyy easier if I received a notification email from that specific agent/doc specialist.
I hope someone has an answer because I find the email notifications to be such a nice feature BUT when I’m receiving 1-200 email notifications a day from Asana on top of all the other emails I get per day it’s useless. I can’t track anything this way.

Please help!

1 Like