Email to Inbox usability issues

Email to Inbox usability issues

From this feature users that benefit the most are that use automation tools to collect incoming data.
Manually sending email could be the case but it takes more time than just open dynalist

Email to inbox can be used to easy way of collecting different types of data.

For example:

  • RSS subscriptions
  • Forwarded emails with receipts, job positions, quizzes, meetings
  • Liked/favorite knowledge: twitter, youtube, pinterest, many more platforms
  • etc. etc.

THose allow user automatically add data to handle it late into inbox.

Few problems current implementation
From Email sent to Dynalist is get Subject as list Item and Body as Note

User might not need to have a note but just have item.
examples:

  • Have a list to tweet as item, actual tweet might be not needed since it should be processed
  • Link to yoututbe, notes here unnecessary since video will be processed later
  • Pinterest, just collection of images, notes with hashtags will add a lot of noise.

Automation tools and Sending Mail Services might not allow blabnk body or add additional information to it.

  • SendGrid - raises error when user trying send email without body
  • Zapier - Body is required field (email get trimmed before check, so no workaround)
  • IFTTT - Doesn’t require body but Add unsubscripted information to the end of email.

Possible solutions:

User might need or not to have body.

  1. Setting to disregard email body can help but it’s not flexible.
  2. Add check for special body to disregard it. For example if body is <empty body> Dynalist will skip body
  3. Additional email for collecting only item:
  • Usual email: XXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX@inbox.dynalist.io
  • Email without node XXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX+no-note@inbox.dynalist.io
    (most of mail providers work with those out of the box)

This format also allow to expand this feature in future:
XXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX+plain@inbox.dynalist.io, XXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX+html@inbox.dynalist.io,
XXXXXXXXXXX_XXXX+attachement@inbox.dynalist.io

I’d be happy for any of solutions (or any another that will allow to skip list item note at all

Will add the <empty> to not insert the note! Thanks for the report.

@Shida Unfortunately it didn’t help.

Automation tools still add unsubscribe links to email to they going to have body anyway.

Can you please update check that body starts with or includes <empty> ?
Another thing that when automation tools see < and > they might filter or escape them (or it get recognized as html.
So Maybe |EMPTY| or smth.
Another nice addition would be to update setting section Email to inbox to indication option with skipping body

Thank you for your help! Will wait for any response)

Example of emails:

Do you have “always trim” option enabled? That should trim off any footers like the unsubscribe button although I’m not sure to what extent it can detect footers.

Your screenshot doesn’t seem to have any mention to in the body text, wondering if that’s related. We can certainly change the “equals” restriction to “startswith” though.

@Shida I have “always trim” enabled.

Also I’ve set body to but I don’t see In dynalist item. Did it got trimer?

But everything after it got into note.
I’m not even sure If I get text or HTML into the dynalist
Maybe change to includes? <empty> can be recognized as Html, and there will be some more html around then

Maybe it got removed since it’s not valid HTML. Perhaps we should use [empty] instead?

@Shida This should help. But to be sure that no one will have messages like this it can be [[empty]] and check is it anywhere in the body (that will help both with Html and weird unsubscribe footers)

I’ve now changed it to [[EMPTY]]. Let me know if that works.

@Shida Yes!! It works :heart_eyes:
That you for doing that!
Also Might be nice this to add notice to Email to inbox in setting so other people also know that feature)

@Sida rember to update the september announcment post…