Help us make email from Asana better!

I have turned off email notification except for the Daily Update because of the sheer amount that we get. One of the reason being, when we reply to the email, all the images in our signature then get sent as separate emails to each collaborators. So one reply suddenly turned into 5 emails notification to every single collaborator of the task. To be honest this is now proving to be a deterrent to some of our users in using Asana.

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Same issue for us. I asked our admin if they can disable the auto signatures when the email is sent to Asana. Unfortunately, due to company policy, it’s not possible. That’s why I always encourage my team to keep Asana open and update there directly.

Same with us, except with some of my team members, they find it difficult because Asana doesn’t have browser notifications so they don’t know when there is an update to a task that they’re following.

We live and die by email (and spreadsheets) so email improvements are exciting to us!

We would love to see the parent task name added to subtask email notifications. We have a lot of projects where the subtasks are exactly the same across projects. When a user is assigned or completes such a subtask, the email notification does not provide the name of the parent project until we click the email link to open it in Asana.

Also, it would be helpful if Asana could highlight the new stuff in an email so at a glance, you can see the latest update on any given task.

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Thanks for the feedback Krista! When you get a chance, would you mind completing the survey here: https://www.getfeedback.com/r/n5PUsAb7 so I can make sure you’re included in the early-access program?

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Completed it this morning, Johanna.

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Same here. I just use the Asana inbox. I already have enough emails.

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My biggest problem with the Asana project emails is that they all look the same. With task opened, task closed, change date, new message, etc., it’s only secondary text that changes to reflect the update. It would be nice if these different actions were more visually dominant in the emails. Excited to see new and improved emails from Asana!

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Ok I promised further thoughts and here they are:

  1. Fundamentally they should include all information possible. There are searches and views where this can be improved in Asana. If a sub task for instance is overdue, give its Team, Project, and Parent and Section to add context. Some may disagree that this is too busy but you know how CPA’s are for details. My feeling is why not use the same hierarchical structure we work in every day in Asana.
  2. I prefer the be sorted on Organization on Team on Project on Section (If Used)
  3. The ability to check off as complete as an example of the Overdue Task Email without opening Asana. I don’t even mind if it requires sending a return email.
  4. Use fonts to major on the majors and minor on the minors while providing all the information
  5. BEING A FINANCIAL GUY I AM NOT A GRAPHICS ARTIST, BUT YOU GET THE PICTURE In reality I build a lot of things in black and white because its clean, not because I am for or against the goth look :slight_smile:
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We are a very small company, no time to participate on beta testing. But we highly appreciate that you really include customers in imprevements of asana and we dont want to miss our chance on this topic.

What we would love: define a new type of collaborator, that has no asana account and is not forced to get one, but can still recieve mails and reply to them, so that they show up in the task they belong to.

Reason: our clients would never ever agree to have an account only to work with us. And we don’t want to make their own workflows more complicated, we want to deliver peace of mind. But what they all would do is answer to mails, they do it anyway, if those mails are easy to the eyes and look like normal mails do.

So: please considere to make asana be the most easy to use - kinda - ticket system on the planet.

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I’m not entirely sure what the intent of this research is. If it is to evaluate the effectiveness of emails received from Asana by Asana users, then I don’t have much to add, because we turn off those email notifications, as they are already included in the “Inbox” of the client.

However, if it is to evaluate the effectiveness of emails received from Asana by NON-Asana users (like clients); then I have a quite a bit of input to provide. Quite frankly, there is much left to be desired, and it is a major obstacle to our using Asana to interact with clients. Currently, when you share a task with a “guest”, they receive a confusing and off-putting message asking them to sign up for an Asana account. Then they find they can’t open any attachments (like, uh, bids?) without signing up for an account

Our clients don’t want to sign up for an Asana account. In fact, they don’t want to have to change their technology at all in order to do business with us. And they certainly don’t want to have to sign up in order to open any attachments included in the shared task. There are a number of task management systems that don’t impose this cumbersome limitation and I fear that we will have to start evaluating them soon.

PLEASE consider changing this in order to help facilitate our relationship, communications and workflow with clients better. If our clients could simply receive an email for any tasks shared that didn’t require an Asana account, and allowed them to open any attachments in tasks directly, it would hugely facilitate the workflow with our customers.

Thanks!!

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@Matthew_Oates Have you been following this thread Asana as Your Email App. Move over, Gmail

yep, seen it, tried it. There are some issues with it, the least of which
is 50 New Tasks that show up every day for me. Would prefer if they fixed
this problem in the native app before I bet my business on a 3rd party
addon.

Matt

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@Matthew_Oates - Here are my thoughts:

Of course we’d all prefer that our chosen provider, Asana, handle all incoming modes of communication (email, chats, tweets) and put them into Asana for handling. But the problem isn’t quite as easy as that, because of these considerations:

  • Email inboxes get marketing email, automated sales solicitations, system alerts and lots of internal email – all non-client communications. They must be intelligently ignored, without requiring users to manually approve/unapprove senders, otherwise your Asana will get flooded, and all you are then doing is moving the problem from email to the Asana inbox.

  • As you have noted, the reason we want a better “emails and Asana” solution is because of client management requirements. Clients are most certainly not going to want to use Asana because their agency/vendor uses it (with some exceptions).

  • With client emails there are cc’s to stakeholders both within the client’s organization, and yours. Sub-threads are created with lesser/fewer people. Forwards happen to ensure privacy and discuss sensitive issues. Automatically moving all such emails to Asana can cause privacy problems (people seeing emails they should not be seeing).

  • Just putting emails into Asana isn’t enough, you have to be able to, after assigning them to people, reply to them. Having to go back to the email app then defeats the purpose of putting these tasks in Asana. So there has to be replies from within Asana, the ability to see who you’re replying to, and synchronization of all replies from the outside to the Asana tasks.

Asana’s core technology is a tracking system, with the first application being task management. But, as the company is going towards larger businesses as well, it’s not feasible to think that Asana will solve all problems that the businesses will demand. Email management is one such area, and there are a number of companies that are focused on that, including ours, Onboardify.

[Now, since you mentioned that you got 50 tasks a day, presumably by using our Dossier app, that’s where the routing comes in. You can choose which clients/senders get ignored, which clients are accepted, and even route emails from specific clients to specific Asana projects. I don’t want to digress too far into how to set up our 3rd party app, but wanted to mention it, so you know the app is designed to help you reduce your email.

For example, we connect to CRMs such as HubSpot and Salesforce – so, if your client already exists there, his/her emails get routed. If they don’t, we don’t put it into Asana. That’s an example of a mid-size to larger enterprise use case].

Sorry, Vik, I was actually trying to respond to another topic that had to
do with Asana conducting research about emails they send out natively. You
bring up some great points, however.

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@Johanna_Pajak Did you have any major take aways from the research you did on this?

Thanks

Is there any way to create browser notifications like Facebook or WhatsApp notifications, without creating a corresponding email? My team uses the phone app almost exclusively due to our dynamic workflow and on the go nature. I also noticed that their are differences between the IPhone app and the Android App. This makes it difficult to train my team how to properly use the tools since they are different in many ways.

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Hi @Johanna_Pajak

Not sure what the net output of the research around email was.

I’ve submitted this elsewhere as well, but I’m having trouble figuring out which email I can reply “complete” to complete a task out of my email (aka If i were to get my inbox overview of tasks to be done, I’d love to be able to reply with a task name and say complete to complete it right out of my email, in this case outlook)

Currently all the notifications I receive are from “no-reply@asana.com” – any pointers to what I’m missing here?

I’m referring to https://asana.com/guide/team/onboard/asana-and-email#gl-email-integrations. > Manage email from Asana

Asana can also send you emails about new notifications. We recommend keeping this turned on until you’re in the habit of using Asana and checking your Asana Inbox daily. It’s also helpful if you simply work in email a lot, because you can take action on tasks from your inbox. Notification emails from Asana allow you to:

Mark tasks complete—reply with Complete

I would like emails to look different for each category of email I receive. For instance…

  1. I would like an email that someone has “liked” comment to be instantly recognizable. I need to see that they liked it, but I don’t need to open that email. If it was obvious that email is just notifying me of a “like” I can acknowledge that in mind, and simply delete that email without having to open it.
  2. If someone adds a task, I would like that email to look obvious that someone added a task.
  3. A completed task email would also be distinctive - I don’t need to open this kind fo email - I just need to see it and delete it. This saves me time.
  4. I would also like the emails with comments to be distinctive. AND I would like the ability to “like” that comment without having to go into asana. That is a waste of time, every second counts.

Thoughts: Perhaps each different category of emails is shown in the email’s subject line before the project name, like this…

Subject line of emails reads: LIKE {insert project name & first three words of comment that was liked}
Subject line of emails reads: COMMENT {insert project name & first three words of comment}
Subject line of emails reads: COMPLETED {insert project name}
Subject line of emails reads: TASK ADDED {insert project/task name}

Also, in order for me to read quickly, you can have an identifying image within each different category of emails. A thumbs up image for LIKED, a chat box for COMMENT, a check mark for COMPLETED, and a plus sign for emails about a TASK ADDED.

Lastly, I would like emails when a due date is changed. This image could a calendar. And so on.

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