Agreed. With the api and gmail integration (which I don’t get to use), can’t see why this couldn’t be easily implemented.
I use my watch to dictate tasks to asana while driving - works great but they all get lost at bottom of todo because they have no date. I organize My Tasks using due date. I’d love to either have the email include the due date somehow (although I can’t think how), or even better would be to use Today as due date. This would put all new tasks at top of list so I can then review them in office and edit as needed.
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Hi @James_Shaw! While you can set an assignee when creating a task via email (Turning emails into Asana tasks | Product guide • Asana Product Guide), it’s not possible to add a due date to your task via email. We already have a thread on this topic, so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it to consolidate feedback on this topic. Feel free to add you vote on this main thread! 
This is a must for me and my group. Default to today seems an obvious and easy workaround allowing you to fast redistribute the task using the asana calendar tool (which by the way, should be bidirectionally bound to Outlook to make it a Killer App.
Also bulk move the task through calendar with Multiselection would help a lot…
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All those who want a a task due date from a Gmail, Exchange, or Outlook email to happen automatically, would you please provide feedback on the best way to do this, here? We already provide most of this functionality, and are ready to work on this specific request.
- Would you want to set the task’screate date automatically to the date the email was sent, today, or N days later?
- Should the email-created-task be assigned to the recipient (yourself), or unassigned?
- Should calendar items in Outlook/Gmail be added to Asana as tasks with a due date corresponding to the calendar item’s date?
Context: Dossier’s silent email-to-task service takes incoming or outgoing emails, and creates Asana tasks. Tasks get added either to a single project, or each external domain can go to its own Asana project (ex. all emails from fedex.com go to project Fedex). See video Using Asana to Organize Customer Email.
Looks like I decided to comment on this feature on just the right day. I came to see if others had been asking for a feature upgrade that would allow a task due date to be set in the email sent to
Asana.
Currently, I use this feature a lot, even though I have the Outlook plugin that lets me create a detailed task directly from Outlook. The problem I’m having with that is that it logs me out of Asana at some interval, so by the time I have the chance to create a task using the Outlook plugin, I have to go through the login procedure first, which is annoying. So I go back to creating a task via email, and going into Asana to set the due date when I have time.
Sometimes, I don’t have time, and important tasks are buried at the bottom of my task list because I prefer to sort by due date.
To answer your questions, Vik:
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The tasks CREATE date is less important to me than the DUE date. I would set the CREATE date to the date the email was sent, and set the DUE date to a date found in the subject line, like [due: 05/07/2019]. Hopefully you could build a parser that would look for that in the subject line. But if not, I agree with others who say the next best thing would be to default the DUE date to the current date (equal to CREATE date). Not ideal, but it would help tasks from getting lost or delayed for people like me.
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Currently, tasks created by sending email to x@mail.asana.com default to being assigned to the sender if not otherwise specified. I have no problem with the way this is currently setup. (Turning emails into Asana tasks | Product guide • Asana Product Guide) Perhaps I’m missing something in the question. This isn’t broken in my view.
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I have no opinion on this as I’ve not really put much thought to it.
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Hi Jay–firstly, welcome to the Asana community. I’ve been using Asana for 7 years, and simultaneously appreciate the product and find it indispensable for the team. Occasionally, I feel that it has reached its design limitation in some way, and so I first reach out to the Asana community to see if there’s a solution, or an Asana add-on has solved the problem. #ittakesavillage.
Why would you modify the title of an email when sending it to Asana to indicate a due date? Is it because, you’re in the Gmail interface, want to create a task from it, but set a due date? I guess, ideally, either the limited Asana add-on or one of the free ones would allow you to do this in the UI.
Since these add-ons don’t do that, the next best thing is to specify it in the email info itself. But it is natural to add a highly constrained “[due 10/19/2019]” string to the subject line? What would be a more natural way to do this in the email itself? ex. Add a note to the email as you’re sending it, ex. “due 10/19/2019” or “due Friday” or “Due next Thu”?
Thanks to the input of the Asana customers on this thread, we are working on this for our automated Dossier emails-to-Asana add-on. We ourselves use Asana, and are always filing away client emails in Asana, so it will help us set a due date automatically. FWIW, I personally would like to have a preference that says “All emails should be due today”, but for now we are making it be today+1d. If we get feedback on this, we can make it a preference.
@Jay_Daugherty my company Stratelyze has the original Outlook app Sendana Outlook To Asana - Sendana - #108 by James_Carl and will do what you ask and so much more and guess what, within the next two weeks we will be adding the additional features of
- Adding subtasks to tasks or subtasks
- Independently adding attachments to Task or subtasks
- Adding comments to existing task or subtasks
Sendana is the original Outlook Add-in for Asana directed at power user functions. It is compatable with using GMail within Outlook as well as Exchange. Here is the second feature screen about to be added as enhancement.
We target comprehensive bridging of Outlook to Asana and have for 3 years. Asana and Stratelyze have a very amicable relationship as we both understand our audiences. Sendana is an approved integration on Asana’s integration listing. Sendana • Asana
FYI Flowsana’s new hashtag automation feature lets you easily set the due date when emailing a task into Asana, just by including the due date anywhere in the email body with a hashtag.
You can specify the date in a wide variety of ways: in addition to typing a date in a format like #12/28 or #June 15, you can also type a natural-language phrase for the date, like #tomorrow, #next Wed, #in 2 weeks, etc.
Flowsana generally recognizes date phrases in the following languages:
- English
- Spanish
- French
- German
- Portuguese
- Chinese (simplified)
You can also include a time-of-day in your date phrase to set the task’s due date to a specific time.
In addition to the due date, hashtag automation also lets you set other elements of a task, again just by using hashtags in the email body:
- Tags
- An assignee
- Additional projects
You can read more about hashtag automation in this Flowsana knowledgebase article.
Adding a due date when I email in for be really helpful for me as well. I can’t use the add-ons because my Gmail domain admin blocks them. Evernote has a markup for subject lines that works well:
Email Subject : [Title of note] ![optional date for reminder] @[notebook] #[tag]
I also have a lot of teams and projects, so for emailing to Asana something like
Email Subject : [Title of task] ![optional date] @[team] ~[project] #[tags]
would be awesome.
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Hi @Libby_Hemphill and welcome to the forum!
FYI, Flowsana is not an add-in; it works in the background on the server side of things so there would not be the blockage issue.
But if you haven’t yet, you should still upvote this topic. 
Thanks, @Phil_Seeman. I voted. I see Flowsana has the feature, but I’d rather not pay for another service when I’m already paying for Asana. I definitely think this is something that should be built-in.
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Agreed! i feel like at every turn to make Asana do basic functions we have to invest largely into another application that makes things possible. Like a money grab. I voted. But i will not invest $3 per user to make it happen. Thats just nonsense lol
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I’ve just started using email forwarding to organize tasks I receive from email in Asana. I like how easy it is, but I’ve found it’s easy for the tasks to get lost in Asana after I forward them. Specifically, I prefer the Calendar view for my tasks. However, since forwarded emails aren’t given any due date, they do not show on the Calendar at all. I have to remember to check the List view to see the tasks.
It would be great to have an option to automatically add a due date of the current date to tasks from forwarded emails. That way, the tasks would show on the Calendar view and I could drag them to whatever due date they need to have.
Welcome to the Forum @anon52525465 and thank you for sharing your feedback with us!
There is an existing thread regarding this topic so I’ve gone ahead and merged your post with it to consolidate feedback! I hope it’s OK! Please don’t forget to cast your vote by clicking on the Vote button at the top left corner of the thread .
I hope you continue enjoying Asana Sam! Have a great Friday!
Just want to add to this, that because of our organization:
- we cannot pay for third party integrations/add-ons etc when we already pay for Asana
- we cannot even install the Asana integration/add-on to our Outlook
Please make this a priority. I am such an advocate for Asana, but we really need this feature, and none of the other workarounds work for us. Thanks!
It would be very useful to be able to include field settings in the subject or body of an email sent to Asana.
For example, including #duedate:09/08/2019 or #startdate:01/08/2019
Hi @Alex_Bailey1,
Not to deflect from the good suggestion and the ability for people to upvote here, but FYI my Flowsana integration has a HashTag Automation feature which provides just this type of capability.
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Hi @Phil_Seeman,
Thanks I haven’t come across Flowsana before. I assume its something like Zapier.
I’ll investigate that.
… Flowsana looks great!
The HashTag Automation looks like it will do just the trick nicely. 
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