I like the email–>asana method of creating tasks. I wish there were more options like assigning due dates, or otherwise populating custom fields. For instance, I receive emails from my mobile deposits of the form:
“Dear JEREMY LEVY: The following Mobile Deposit you made on 02/18/2020 has been received. Deposit To: Circle Checking xxxxxxxxxx Deposit Amount: $162.98 Date of Deposit: 02/18/2020 Money Available: 1 Business Day Reference #: 12345654321”
I would like to be able to map the “02/18/020” date onto the “due date” field of the task, map $162.98 onto a custom field for “Deposit Amount”, etc. This could be specified by a parse string that searches for “Mobile Deposit you made on <1> has been received” and “Deposit Amount: <2> Date”, etc.
With this kind of automation I could autoforward the email to x+@mail.asana.com and it would parse the key information into custom field. That would be pretty useful.
Hi @Jeremy_Levy!
Not exactly the same parsing method you suggest, and not to discount the value of your suggestion which is a good one, but FYI some of what you’re asking for is available in the Hashtag Automation feature of my Flowsana integration. It doesn’t currently populate custom fields, but will let you set a due date (and My Tasks section), as well as assignee, tags and projects, all from the body of an incoming email, via the user of #hashtags.
Thanks for your comment! flowsana seems like a nice integration, and could probably do a lot of what I want. I have two asana organizations with close to 100 in each, and the $2.99/mo/user is about $7000/year. I do like where your flowsana is going though…
Do note that Flowsana’s billing is team-based; that is, its Billable Users are full Asana users in teams which have workflow-enabled projects in them. So if some of those 100 users are not in teams that would have workflow-enabled projects, you would not be paying for those users.
I would like to be able to specify custom fields in the email body.
My task has a custom field called Customer Activity.
If I send an email or calendar invite to the project via its email address, I’d like to be able to populate the custom field by a key/value pair in the body.
For example,
Customer Activity: Cadence Call
Note that the custom field already exists in the project, and it is a set list of existing values.
this would allow to save some time and trigger rules already in place in Asana…