Feature Request: Create sub-tasks via email

Hi Team,

It’s a good feature to create task via email. However, it would be better to create sub-tasks also via email. Users won’t need to sign in to Asana again and again. They will have a defined email template to create tasks and sub-tasks.

Please consider this point.

Regards,
Dinesh Singh Bisht

Hi @Dinesh

A good point in here. Question, how would you identify the parent task in an email?

Carlo

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Hi Carlo, Thanks for your quick reply! A task is already being identified
in an email we receive as a group member when someone creates a task. In
those emails, we have options to :

  1. Reply to email to add a comment
  2. REPLY WITH: include teammate in “to” field to assign
  3. REPLY WITH: complete to mark complete
  4. REPLY WITH: "cc" teammates to add as a collaborator

In similar fashion, there could be options as under to create a sub-task
e.g. reply with Sub-Task:.

Feel free to reply :slight_smile:

Best Regards,
Dinesh Bisht
M. +91 9552515857

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@Dinesh Asana helped me to kill 90% of my emails, so I was not even aware of the possibility to mark a task as complete from the email! :slight_smile:

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Having quite a bit of familiarity with Task Creation as the developer of Sendana you have to understand the following:

  1. The email system has to attach on to a unique task ID which is in the correspondence so in order to create a subtask you would have to know the unique ID of the task when creating.
  2. Creation of tasks in general can be done of course with x@asana.mail.com.
  3. Assining to a project requires the project I.D which is a very long number (one of the reasons for developing Sendana.
  4. Project Conversation and Team Conversations are a unique syntax made up of name etc
  5. So the bottom line is the email system has no way to identify the task ID which would be necessary and could only come from some type of email sent from Asana.
  6. The only way to do this is possibly using the API which we are looking into for Sendana to expand its capabilities beyond the email system. Querying the API for every task in a project though may be a very slow process and I am pretty sure the API does not support the creation of subtask and I know it does not support the creation of Project Conversations and Team Conversation.

A little technical but wanted you to know what is going on.

I disagree. I personally was able to create a Java application which replicates the contents of a project, including tasks and their subtasks, and even other properties like tags.

Subtasks API reference.

@LenSantos Thank you, that’s the good thing about the community. I think you would agree that the ability to create from email does not exist and you would have to have a UI inside the email that is looking up the parent tasks and then use the subtask creation as you specified. Would you agree?

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Yes. I do agree that the task / conversation creation via email is limited. I think it is due to the fact that the email structure is standard across all platforms and applications. So Asana is very dependent on this structure.

Yes, I also agree that the only way to do it is via a custom-coded add on.

Honestly, I also wanted to create an app within MS Outlook, or any of the MS Office applications, especially MS Project, which will integrate with Asana. The problem is, I don’t have much experience with VB and that I don’t have the time to learn it as of the moment.

Our Outlook app is working very very well and I hired a top notch programmer with a Microsoft MVP certification and having done 100’s of add-ins. We are taking on the project as we speak of using the API for tasks and the email system for conversations. If you use MS Outlook on a PC feel free to download the trial and give me any feedback. I am a consultant deep into this project financially so I hope people will see how significantly if increases productivity. My testers love it. Thanks for your comments.