Receive email into projects

Every project can have its own mailbox address. Send or forward an email to it and the email becomes a task in that project: the subject line is the task title and the message text lands in the description, with the sender credited. It is the fastest way to capture requests that arrive in your inbox.

One-time setup (Owner or Admin)

Inbound email runs on your organization’s own email infrastructure, so an Owner or Admin connects it once before project mailboxes go live:

1. Open Integrations in the sidebar and go to the Inbound Email tab.

2. Pick your provider (Mailgun, SendGrid, or Postmark), enter the domain that will receive mail, and paste the provider’s signing key.

3. Verify the domain by adding the TXT record shown, then select verify once DNS has propagated.

4. In your provider’s dashboard, point its inbound route or parse webhook at the URL shown on the same tab.

Every inbound message is checked against your provider’s signature, so only mail genuinely relayed by your configured provider is accepted.

Find a project’s address

1. Open the project, open the Settings tab under More, and select Mailbox.

2. Copy the address shown. It looks like task-...@yourdomain.com and is unique to this project.

3. Email it, or add it as a forwarding target in your mail client. Each message creates one task.

The same tab lists the recently received emails with their status and the task each one created, so you can confirm a forwarded message arrived.

How emails map to tasks

• The subject becomes the task title; the message text becomes the description, ending with a “Received via email from” line.
• New tasks start in To Do with Medium priority.
• If the sender’s address matches a member of your organization, the task is created in their name and assigned to them. Otherwise it is recorded against the project owner and labeled as having arrived via email.

Caution

File attachments are not carried onto the task. Only the subject and message text are captured, so paste important content into the body or share a link.

Reply to a task’s email to comment on it

Once inbound email is set up and a project has a mailbox, every notification email about a task can be replied to. The reply becomes a comment on that task, posted as you, with the quoted history stripped out. The email says so in a line under the message, and its Reply-To is already pointed at the right task, so replying is the whole gesture.

The comment is treated exactly like one typed in the app: mentions notify, automations fire, webhooks send.

Change the status in the same reply

Put a status word on the first line, on its own, and the task moves as well. The rest of the reply is still the comment.

First line	Status
Done, Complete, Completed, Finished	Done
In progress, In-progress, Started, Working on it	In progress
Review, In review, Ready for review	In review
Blocked	Blocked
To do, Todo, Reopen, Reopened	To do

Capitalisation does not matter and a trailing full stop is fine.

The word has to be the whole line

“I’m done with the draft” is a comment, not a status change, and that is deliberate: matching the word anywhere in a sentence would move tasks people were only talking about. The first line has to be the status word and nothing else.

What a reply cannot do

• Reply from the address you were emailed at. The sender has to be an active member of the organization. A reply from anyone else is handled as a new inbound email, so it becomes a new task recorded against the project owner, exactly as before.
• Your real permissions apply. A Viewer cannot comment by email any more than they can in the app, and a Contributor can comment but not change the status. Email is another way in, not a way around.
• An empty reply posts nothing. A message that is only quoted history is dropped rather than posted as a blank comment.

If the address leaks

Anyone who knows a project’s mailbox address can create tasks in it, so treat the address like a shared secret. If it leaks (for example, it ends up on a public mailing list), open the Mailbox view and rotate the address. The project immediately gets a new address and the old one stops working. Rotation is limited to organization admins.

Best practices

1. Use mailboxes for inbound, not outbound. The mailbox accepts; doesn’t reply. Use it for forwarded requests or BCC to capture decisions.
2. Set up forwarding rules from team inboxes. A “feature-request@” forwarding rule routes inbound requests into the right project. Skip the manual paste.
3. Treat mailbox addresses as secrets. Anyone with the address can create tasks. Rotate when it leaks (e.g., posted on a public list).
4. Cite “Received via email” in the description. Onplana adds this automatically. It distinguishes email- created tasks from manually-created ones.
5. Pair with workflows. “Task created from email” → route based on subject keyword. Catches different request types from the same mailbox.

Troubleshooting / common pitfalls

• Email forwarded but no task appears. Three causes: (a) provider signature check failed; (b) DNS not propagated; (c) provider config not yet pointed at Onplana URL.
• Wrong assignee on the task. Email sender doesn’t match a member. Defaults to project owner. Verify member’s email matches.
• Attachment didn’t come through. By design. Attachments are not captured. Paste content into body or share link.
• Address leaked. Rotate it from the Mailbox view. Old address dies; new one issues.
• Inbound webhook returning errors. Check provider’s delivery logs. Onplana rejects unsigned mail.

How this combines with other features

• Mailbox + Workflows. Task created from email = workflow trigger. Route based on content. See Build a workflow.
• Mailbox + Intake forms. Web form + email both create tasks. Use either per submitter preference.
• Mailbox + Outlook integration. Outlook user can forward emails via the mailbox; alternative to the Email-to-Task flow. See Connect Google and Microsoft.
• Mailbox + Notifications. Task creation triggers notifications to project members per their preferences.

Coming from another tool

Tool	Mapping
Asana email forwarding	Direct concept
Jira email handler	Direct
ServiceNow inbound email	Direct
Linear’s email-in	Direct
Trello email forwarding	Direct

FAQs

Which plans include this? All of them. The only prerequisite is the one-time provider setup, since inbound mail flows through your own Mailgun, SendGrid, or Postmark account and domain.

Can an email become a comment on an existing task instead? Not today. Every accepted email creates a new task; replies to the same thread create new tasks too.

Who can see a project’s mailbox address? Organization Owners, Admins, and Portfolio Managers, plus the project’s own members. Members of other projects cannot read it.

Does the project mailbox cost extra? No, included in every plan. The mailbox uses your own provider (Mailgun, SendGrid, Postmark) so you control the email cost.

Can I customize the email-to-task mapping? Today: subject → title, body → description, fixed. To customize behavior, use a workflow on the email-created task to set fields based on content.

Is auto-categorization supported? Not natively today. Use a workflow to inspect subject + apply tags or move to epic. AI-assisted categorization is on the roadmap.

Related

• Build a workflow, route email-created tasks
• Create public intake forms, web-form alternative
• Connect Google and Microsoft, Outlook Email-to-Task