Issues with email forwarding and task creation

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I believe I have banged my head against email → tasks issue for a while and have a fairly good understanding of the restrictions imposed on it. I will outline what I want to happen and why I don’t think it’s working…

Our organization uses google workspace and we ant to set up support boards for issue triage with workflow etc. I want to have a google group called client.support@organization.com that notifies a group of people, sends an automatic response and creates a ticket in the board with the correct creator etc.

I’ve tried a couple of things:

1. Add the x+asdasd@mail.asana.com address to the google group

This should really be as complex as it needs to be, and this works if the sender is a user@organization.com address, however if I send from my personal email this ends up failing with:

We couldn’t process your email because it was sent by organization.com but your email domain is gmail.com. Please contact your email admin to update your mail server’s email settings.

This is due to the fact that the way google groups works is that it sends the email with the From header as my personal address but has originated from organization.com’s mail servers as far as asana is concerned. Google groups doesn’t offer a way to change the From address to the group email unfortunately which makes sense given how it’s supposed to behave.

2. set up a routing rule so that x+asdasd@mail.asana.com is added as a recipient when the recipient is client.support@organization.com

This works if the external domain is using google mail servers, e.g. gmail addresses, but if it’s using some other mail servers then you get this:

We couldn’t process your email because it was sent from a server that is not authorized to send emails for external-domain.com Please contact your email admin to update your domain’s email settings.

I assume this is due to spf alignment or something.

Problem Statements and Next Steps

  • It looks like the only way asana will accept the mail is if it’s sent from an email address that is linked to an account on the asana board and that email passes spf alignment etc
  • It does not look like I can change the from address to client.support@organization.com via google workspace by routing rules, which I wanted to avoid anyway so as ticket creator attribution actually works
  • A working approach is to create an actual account that has a mailbox so that the mail is actually received by google workspace and copied to a new email using a forwarding rule, this way the headers should pass asana’s validation rules. However this is really nasty solution and presents a host of other issues such as:
    • we needlessly pay for a user account when we don’t need one
    • managing users in who would have access to just that client’s support is problematic
    • security implications of a shared user account
    • this breaks ticket creator attribution

I guess from here I would like to know if anyone has a working solution to get a custom email address associated with an asana board using google workspace while maintaining the creator attribution and user validation (i.e. you can’t create a ticket without being on the board).

I.e. Is there some some set of routing rules or custom headers and or some settings in asana to get the email validation to pass??

Note: I have found and reviewed the below info and it has not been helpful beyond understanding the general current state of things:

3 Likes
2

Just wanted to join the conversation to add that we are struggling with this as well. We’d love to have our Google Group info@domain address create tasks automatically in Asana so that we can assign them appropriately to our staff members that need to respond.

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Has anyone found a solution to this problem?

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One possible solution is to add the shared email as an alias for a very responsible user on google workspace, then use the ‘create a filter and forward’ from that user’s inbox. I had done this in the past before I found out that google groups exists. draw back is that your filter has to be very wide, and allow possible spam into asana in order to share the odd one-off incoming mail from customers.

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I made it work with a new solution - subscribing to all emails from the shared group inbox for my workspace gmail (I have the group setting to add a prefix to all emails, used in later filters), setting it up to forward to x@mail.asana.com if gmail filter for [email subject prefix] (added the ‘skip my inbox’ feature on the gmail filter) which adds it to my tasks. Then Make.com is watching for new tasks, filtering on my new tasks with contains [email subject prefix], then make.com is assigning it to the shared project for support, and reassigning to my employee. Used make.com because the rules in asana didn’t seem to have all the features I wanted for the rules. make.com also allows more flexibility.

This gets things where they need to be and doesn’t create any duplicate tasks/emails/tickets/whatever you want to call them.

This solution gets me

1 Like
6

Welcome, @Devin_Ergler,

Looks like the end of your last post got truncated perhaps?

Your solution is impressive. Could it be streamlined slightly by skipping your My Tasks and using the shared support project address:

image

Thanks,

Larry

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I got a bit distracted and didn’t finish writing! leaves me with clean my tasks and clean inbox. There will be additional challenges for emails inboxes which receive spam, can combat that with filters on the forwarding in gmail or with make.com.

Thanks for sharing this tidbit I was trying to test this feature to send directly to a project but didn’t find that link. The settings dialogue for email forwarding in asana is ambiguous and misleading, but you’ve saved the day!

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I’d like to implement this for our team. Same situation at our company. Are you still satisfied with your solution?