As you all know our main tool in work is Nozbe. We use it to plan our blog posts, to track features requested by our users, to develop new versions of our app, to provide customer support, and the list goes on and on…
Because we still live in email…
… we need a way to add tasks to Nozbe with email. We introduced it a while ago and a few years ago improved it: you can forward one email to Nozbe and it converts the subject line to a task name and adds email body to the task as a comment. You can also send several tasks to Nozbe with one email message. Here’s the screencast and tutorial.
But let’s go one step more…
In our company we track issues reported by customers in Nozbe and you provide us with feedback mainly via email, we started being tired of copying the email body and pasting it as a comment to Nozbe.
We needed to be able to send comments to already existing tasks via email.
We built this feature a while ago mainly for ourselves. As you were sending us more information about your most requested Nozbe features we kept forwarding these emails to Nozbe to their appropriate tasks in our “Features requested” project. Now we want to share with you how to do that - hopefully you’ll find it useful as well.
How to email a comment to an existing task?
Here’s my quick example that best illustrates how it works. Let say I have a project Michael’s birthday party and one of my tasks there is to: Research gift ideas for him:
I already have some ideas stored in Evernote and attached to this task, but I want to go on with the research and add more options. As you may know Michael, our CEO, loves running and I found an awesome book about that. It could be very good gift. I should definitely add it to my task. To do so I need to share above web page via email with my personalized nickname.PIN@nozbe.me email address (you’ll find it in the Settings of your Nozbe app).
Until this moment the procedure is the same as sending a task via email. However now comes a twist.
I need to add an additional parameter to the subject line: #task: TASK NAME
You can see how I’m adding #task: Research gift ideas to my email subject line:
Two things to remember:
- this parameter can be added instead of subject line or at the end of it. In the latter case the rest of subject line will go to the beginning of the comment
- another thing is that you don’t have to put the entire name of the task like I did: “Research gift ideas”. It is enough to write Resea or gift or idea. You only have to be careful that the name you put matches only that one desired task. If it matches other tasks the comment will go randomly to one of them.
And here’s the result:
Here you can watch the whole process on screencast I recorded for you:
Please note this feature is an experiment and we would like to hear some feedback from you. Maybe you have some ideas how to implement it better? It works for us - hopefully it’ll work for you, too. Thanks for getting your things done with Nozbe!
Rafal (Nozbe Product Manager)