When you create a task from an email with the Asana for Outlook add-in, the email is added as a comment on the task. That comment carries the sender, the subject and the body — but none of the other headers, and in particular not the date and time the email was sent.
How this affects the workflow
Several teams I work with use the add-in as their main intake: emails that require action become tasks, and the task becomes the record of that request. When someone picks the task up later, the first question is almost always “when did this come in?” because it determines the priority and, in a lot of cases, whether a response window has already been missed.
Right now that information is simply gone once the task exists. The only date available is the comment’s own timestamp, which records when the task was created in Asana, not when the message was sent. The two match only if the email was processed the moment it arrived. In practice, people batch their inbox, or turn a two-week-old thread into a task, and the gap can be days with nothing on the task to indicate which situation applies. An approximate date that looks authoritative is worse than no date at all.
The workaround is to open Outlook, find the original email and read the date there, which defeats the point of the integration.
What I’d like
That the comment created by the add-in include the full header block — From, Sent, To, Cc, Subject — formatted the way it appears when an email is forwarded to another recipient. Sent date alone would resolve the main pain point; the rest would be a bonus for teams that need to see who else was on the thread.
Has anyone found a reliable way to preserve the sent date while still using the add-in?