Email to Inbox feature stripping out valuable information

Not sure I understand how this is supposed to function; I want to forward content from an email to my inbox, but AFAICT Dynalist is attempting to “clean up” the forwarded email by stripping any content after a line that contains any of the usual forwarding info (subject, from, to, date). Not only does it seem tedious to have to manually strip this out before sending or you won’t get the actual body of the email - also note that stripping this out is esp tedious on a mobile device - but it means valuable info is lost; I want the header info (from, date)!

Is there a way to prevent Dynalist from “cleaning up” the incoming email and just add it to the Inbox as sent?

Any thoughts about this? Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks!
rich

Weird, do you mean nothing under the ---------- Forwarded message --------- line is showing up?

Below is an example of the forwarded email body - I already removed any “Forwarded Message” line. If any of the top 4 lines is present except the “To” line, everything in the body is stripped.

thanks!
rich

From: Allen xxxx <allenxxxxx@icloud.com>
Subject: Notes from allen 2/15
Date: February 15, 2020 at 1:06:36 PM PST
To: Rich xxxxx <xxxxxxx@icloud.com>

Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc Message content, etc etc etc

This thread might be useful: Email to Dynalist | header text only

As mentioned there, we’re using the email provider’s default stripping method, so unfortunately we don’t have much control over that.

I tested with forwarding an email and was able to get this into the inbox (no modification to the email was done, I merely changed the email, from name, and subject to protect the information):

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Doe <xxxxx@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: Possibility of xxxxxxx?
To: Dynalist Admin <admin@dynalist.io>

[CONTENT HERE]

Is the main difference the ---------- Forwarded message --------- line then?

Don’t know, but if I include “Begin Forwarded Message” (which is what Apple Mail inserts) the result is still the same; anything after any of the first three headers is stripped.

Looking at your linked thread, it does describe the problem, but if the email body is stripped of anything it makes the whole exercise useless - I might as well just copy the text I want and paste it into Dynalist. The whole point of forwarding an email to a Dynalist inbox would be to speed up the process of getting email content in - if we can’t trust the content to show up without loads of pre-email intervention (which is tedious on any OS but especially a mobile OS) it makes it unusable.

Anything else that can be done to get this to work?

I have the same problem with forwarded emails from Outlook on Mac (which I noted in the other thread). Right now the only option seems to be to go into the forwarded message and remove the headers. If I do that it goes fine, if the headers are present, only the subject line arrives at Dynalist. Not great functionality if you forward a lot of emails. It pretty severely limits the value of the feature, for me anyway.

What does your forwarded email start with when using Outlook for Mac?

Is it in the same format as mine? (Please see below)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Doe <xxxxx@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Jan 30, 2020 at 2:43 PM
Subject: Re: Possibility of xxxxxxx?
To: Dynalist Admin <admin@dynalist.io>

[CONTENT HERE]

Hi Erica,
Yes, it looks very similar to yours.


From: xxx Tools cxxx@xxx-tools.com
Reply-To: xxx Tools xxx@xxx-tools.com
Date: Monday, February 17, 2020 at 9:15 AM
To: Mark <Mark xxx@xxx.edu>
Subject: New Manager xxxx

[Content]

@Shida: this was not posted as a bug so probably didn’t get your attention. However it seems that forwarded emails work for some cases and not the others.

Should we get a bug filed for this and move it there?

There’s already 2 threads about it under #bugs. Unfortunately we have no control over how the footer stripping is done (We get it already stripped from our email provider), so it’s more likely that you’ll have to fiddle with touching up the message before forwarding it so it’s recognized. If anyone has ideas how to improve this feel free to suggest.

1 Like

Perhaps a different email provider that doesn’t strip the emails? As is, for me anyway, the functionality is no faster/better than just copying and pasting (maybe worse, since reformatting an email in iOS is tedious to start with), and if results are unreliable it’s not usable.

We do have access to the full unstripped email, but inserting that into Dynalist would mean plenty of garbage will make its way in. Hypothetically we could make it an option if you want to use the unstripped email which I imagine could solve your issue. You could then do any sanitization yourself.

Speaking strictly for my own workflow; the point of emailing to DL’s inbox is to quickly get something into DL for later processing - especially when you’re on the run and you just need to dump an important email (or emails) to your list from an iOS or Android device. If you have to fool around with formatting before it’s sent to DL then one might as well just copy and paste. So yes, from my point of view, un-processed/stripped makes much more sense.

With the new update you should be able to fix it with this new option:

2 Likes

ah! this is perfect!! thank you!

1 Like

Oh thank you! I was quite frustrated by tapping forward and only receiving the title.