The new Manage Email Forwarding and Automate Email Replies functionality is very useful, but there are several limitations that currently make the feature difficult to use in practice. We would like to suggest the following improvements:
1. Attachment handling
There are significant limitations regarding attachments when emails are forwarded to Asana or when comments from an Asana task are sent via email.
Email → Asana:
- Attachments are only transferred to Asana if they are added to the email as actual file attachments.
- If a file or image is embedded directly into the email body (e.g. an inline image), it is not transferred to Asana at all.
- This can lead to important information being lost when the email is converted into an Asana task.
Asana → Email:
- When a comment from an Asana task is sent as an email, no attachments are included at all.
- This applies both to:
- actual file attachments added to the Asana task, and
- images/files embedded directly in the task description or comment.
- Ideally, relevant attachments should be included when an Asana task/comment is sent via email, just as users would expect when forwarding or replying to an email.
Suggested improvement:
Support both actual file attachments and inline/embedded images in both directions (Email → Asana and Asana → Email).
2. Flexible management of email recipients
Currently, recipients who are included in an email conversation cannot be manually managed when replying from the Asana task.
The current behavior appears to be:
- Replies are automatically sent to all original email recipients.
- There is no option to manually remove individual recipients.
- There is also no option to add additional recipients when replying from Asana.
This can be problematic when the audience of an email needs to change during the course of a conversation. For example, users may want to:
- remove someone from the conversation,
- add a new stakeholder, or
- limit the reply to only selected recipients.
Suggested improvement:
Allow users to manually edit the recipient list when sending a reply from an Asana task, including the ability to add, remove, or modify recipients before sending.
3. Localization of standard email texts
The automated email replies currently contain standard system-generated texts that are always displayed in English and cannot be configured.
For example:
“Replies to this email will automatically be added to your request.”
This is not ideal for teams operating in different languages, as the rest of the email may be written in another language while the automatically generated text remains in English.
Suggested improvement:
Make standard/system-generated email texts available in multiple languages and ideally allow the language to be configured based on the user’s or organization’s language settings.
At a minimum, the standard texts should be available in commonly supported languages such as German, French, Spanish, Italian, etc.
Summary
Overall, the new email forwarding and automated reply functionality is a valuable addition. However, improving the following three areas would significantly increase its usability:
- Full attachment support in both directions, including inline/embedded content
- Manual control over email recipients when replying from Asana
- Localization/configuration of automatically generated email texts
These improvements would make the email integration much more flexible and better suited for real-world workflows, especially in international and multilingual teams.