Email tasks to table?

Mariza_Bubic · ‎Aug 06, 2019

Hi there, I’m a long term user of Trello and new to Airtable. Trello had a feature where you could forward emails to your board. I would have a to-do list board and whenever I got a request emailed to me I could just forward it to the board and it would create a to-do item for me. Does this function exist within Airtable? Thanks for your help.

JonathanBowen · ‎Oct 09, 2019

Hi @Carlee_Latimer - yes, the way to set this up is:

Create your tasks table - here’s my simple version, with a task title and a task description:

I’ve decided that I want the email subject to go into the title and the email body into the description.

In Zapier you can set up a two-step Zap (so can be done on the free plan) like this:

In the “customize record” part of the Airtable component, map the email fields to the AT table fields:

i.e. Subject goes to Title and Body Plain goes to Description

Switch on your Zap and send an email to the email address noted in the Inbound Email component (under “customize email component”)

This is a fairly simple example and only needs a two-step Zap. If you want to do anything more complicated, you would need more steps to your Zap (probably) and so, a paid Zapier account. By more complicated, I mean, for example, set up the task title, description and an assignee. You would need a more structured email to achieve this and something like the “Parse Email” Zap component to extract specific pieces of data from the email to map to AT fields.

Hope this helps

JB

See Solution in Thread

JonathanBowen · ‎Aug 06, 2019

Hi @Mariza_Bubic - not directly within Airtable, but you could set this up with Zapier:

inbound email to Zapier
parse email in Zapier
send data to Airtable

JB

Carlee_Latimer · ‎Oct 08, 2019

Hi @JonathanBowen I’ve been trying to do this exact thing but keep running into errors. Have you had any luck.

JonathanBowen · ‎Oct 09, 2019

Hi @Carlee_Latimer - yes, the way to set this up is:

Create your tasks table - here’s my simple version, with a task title and a task description:

I’ve decided that I want the email subject to go into the title and the email body into the description.

In Zapier you can set up a two-step Zap (so can be done on the free plan) like this:

In the “customize record” part of the Airtable component, map the email fields to the AT table fields:

i.e. Subject goes to Title and Body Plain goes to Description

Switch on your Zap and send an email to the email address noted in the Inbound Email component (under “customize email component”)

This is a fairly simple example and only needs a two-step Zap. If you want to do anything more complicated, you would need more steps to your Zap (probably) and so, a paid Zapier account. By more complicated, I mean, for example, set up the task title, description and an assignee. You would need a more structured email to achieve this and something like the “Parse Email” Zap component to extract specific pieces of data from the email to map to AT fields.

Hope this helps

JB

Daniel_C · ‎Oct 15, 2023

We made TaskRobin just for this. Compared to Zapier, you don't need to go through the time consuming trial and error process to get it right. Just set it up in a few minutes as it is purposely built for Airtable.

You just need to send the emails you need to save to Airtable to your TaskRobin inbox, and a new record will be created for you in your Airtable table with all the email data: subject, message, sender, attachment files and more! Each data type in it's own fields.

You can also easily integrate this with your existing tables and fields.