General description: this feature allows you to send (or often forward) an email to an email address generated by Dynalist, and the content of the email will be transferred to Dynalist.
Weāre not huge users of this feature ourselves, so we have to ask for help from someone who needs it more! Weād greatly appreciate it if you can tell us your thoughts about any of these points:
Is one document enough? Or should every document has its own email address? The advantages of being able to send to multiple documents is obvious, but if everyone can have only one email address, this can help making the email address a bit more friendly.
How friendly does the email address need to be? Most mail clients allow you to add a name for an email address, and youāll be able to search for that name.
Should the new item be automatically added to the very end, or the beginning, or itās up to you to choose?
Should you be able to email things under an item instead a document too? (e.g. to āTodoā under the āGTDā document. If the 1st level items in a document are all categories like āTodoā, āDoneā, āSomedayā, it doesnāt really make sense to add new items here.)
How should the content of the email be transferred to the newly created item? A straightforward way is to put the subject as the item title, and the body of the email into the note. Are we missing something important like sender email address or time?
This idea has been helpful with other ātodoā products, but from a roadmap perspective it starts to get boggy when you have to consider all of the integration work you need to do to have this capability in multiple OSs, platforms, etc.
Iād be happy if I could ask Siri (or whatever Google calls theirs) to add a task via dictation. Prolly separate feature request for this.
Hmm Iām not sure about the āmultiple OSs and platformsā part. I think all we have to do is to receive emails at a certain email address (e.g. daniel_paner123456 at dynalist.io) and add what you send us as list item. The feature should work independent of what OS or platform you use.
Am I missing something here?
Yeah, that would be either a separate feature or a feature for the iOS app. Would appreciate it if you can open a separate post for that. Thanks!
Hi, Workflowy user here. Recently discovered Dynalist and considering making the change. For me, this is one of the most important features (which is why this is my first post). Workflowy doesnāt have it either, but they add features very slowly so maybe I can have more hope here.
The reason I use apps like Workflowy or this is because there are a LOT of things I like to write down and remember! And I am scatter-brained, so it is not worth my time to go around moving to different lists all the time. My solution is to have a single āinboxā list, where items can be sorted later and important items stand out with tags.
A feature like this is extremely useful, because it means I donāt always have to have my inbox open and taking up space on my screen. Rather, I can make a quick automation (I use Alfred) to add items from anywhere. I used to do this with Remember The Milk, with a keyword āremā. So no matter what I am doing, I just press my Alfred hotkey, type in ārem get a haircut #todoā, hit enter, and done. Alfred takes the text after āremā and sends an email to my RTM email. Worked perfectly with RTM, and I miss it in Workflowy.
I swear I would pay for the development of this by myself to get this implemented quicker. Dynalistās ability to organize information as well as the ability to email in (and store) information would make it a full Evernote replacement. As a pro member, Iām already a little bothered that the only way I can upload content is through my computer WITH A MOUSE (drag&drop, unless Iām missing the keyboard shortcut). Being able to email content in would change all that.
Alfred is a program that lets you assign a global hotkey to type commands from anywhere to do whatever you want. Kind of like spotlight (if you are a Mac-user) but it can do anything. One thing it can do is run an applescript and take your command as input. I have an applescript set up that emails my command to a set address. All I would have to do is switch it from the RTM address to the Dynamist address.
Iām actually going to post a second reason here for why I think this is essential:
I use google Inbox to check emails. One of the drawbacks of Inbox is that it doesnāt have a specific URL for each email. Setting up reminders to email people back is always annoying for this reason, since there is no way to link to a specific email but rather I have to refer to it, such as āemail John backā.
If I could just forward the emails to Dynalist, this would make things so much easier.
Well yes & noā¦ Emailing it to Dynalist you still donāt have a specific URL for the email, so to find it back you still have to search.
Btw, in Inbox you can also use the Snooze function to bring it back at a certain time. You can even Pin first, so you can add a Remember To note, then snooze.
Thatās true ruud, its not a perfect solution. And the snooze and pin functions are great, but not when I want to it specifically to be in my Dynalist list.
Even though there is no URL, I could just copy a unique segment of the forwarded email and search for it in Inbox.
Also, I thought of yet another unique use for emailing. If you are a programmer, sometimes you like to create programs or scripts that write to files. For example, a debug log. But there are lots of other cases too. I am just a beginner programmer, but I find I do this a lot. If I could email straight to Dynalist, there would definitely be some cases where I want to log stuff to Dynalist rather than writing to a text file.
And another idea came as I was writing this. We could also just auto forward all of our sent and recieved emails to Dynalist. It could literraly become a second email invox, and that would be awesome.
Some of my ideas would definitely work better if we could email to specific Dynalist items of course.
Adding the email item feature would just make Dynalist so powerful, its exciting to think about.
Is one document enough? ā¦ Iād prefer to have the email received added as a sub item rather than a document. For instance, Iād add it to my item labeled āInboxā. For this scenario, one item is enough. How friendly does the email address need to be? ā¦ It can be anything, but shouldnāt be tied to some internal ID so that if we need to generate a new email address in the future we can (for instance if our address book is hacked). Should the new item be automatically added to the very end, or the beginning, or itās up to you to choose? ā¦ Iād prefer the end, but it should probably be optional. Should you be able to email things under an item instead a document too? ā¦ Yes, under an item rather than to a document. How should the content of the email be transferred to the newly created item? A straightforward way is to put the subject as the item title, and the body of the email into the note. ā¦ Agreed, adding an email is just a way to get things into Dynalist, weāll still need to massage the new entry (add colors, add tags, change to checkbox, move to the correct spot, etc). Having the subject become the title and the body become the note is a good.
āis one destination enough?ā. It is for me! Do you mind explain a bit more on this? What do you mean by āinternal IDā? You mean you might want to revoke the email address and use a new one? While my phrasing wasnāt the best, your questions focused on exactly what I was trying to get across so poorly. Yes, Iād like to be able to revoke the email address and use a new one at a later date.
ā¢Is one document enough? Or should every document has its own email address? The advantages of being able to send to multiple documents is obvious, but if everyone can have only one email address, this can help making the email address a bit more friendly.
Generally I usually donāt need a large email chain, having the original email is usually sufficient enough to meet my needs.
ā¢How friendly does the email address need to be? Most mail clients allow you to add a name for an email address, and youāll be able to search for that name.
It would be nice to have a friendly email address, but its not a deal killer for me if it has a lot of different letters and numbers on it.
ā¢Should the new item be automatically added to the very end, or the beginning, or itās up to you to choose?
I think it would be nice to designate the document where you want emails to go.
ā¢Should you be able to email things under an item instead a document too? (e.g. to āTodoā under the āGTDā document. If the 1st level items in a document are all categories like āTodoā, āDoneā, āSomedayā, it doesnāt really make sense to add new items here.)
I guess, it its possible, that would also be nice to have that feature.
ā¢How should the content of the email be transferred to the newly created item? A straightforward way is to put the subject as the item title, and the body of the email into the note. Are we missing something important like sender email address or time?
Just the way you describe it sounds fine to me. I hope that my feedback is helpful to you.
Iāve seen two different ways to handle the āintegrate emailsā feature:
Send an email to add items (which this thread is talking about, that Evernote also does)
Click a button to auto-add the emailās hyperlink to a list (which Todoist, Anydo, etc do)
I prefer the second option, even though it has some potential issues. Many of the emails that I turn into tasks are long threads, and I definitely donāt want all that content pasted over. Especially since the content is more easily readable in the original gmail. So in Todoist (and other apps like that), reading an email and seemlessly clicking a button to āadd to todoist as a taskā is the cleanest method Iāve seen.
Problems can arise if you are logged in with multiple accounts, occasionally if you use non-gmail accounts, etc. But Todoist rose to be the largest todo app, at least in terms of combined usage in android/apple/windows/web, probably partially due to this feature.
My current method to add emails to Dynalist: just manually copy the emailās hyperlink over. Itās not that bad, although an automated method would be cool.
I would really like this feature - I desperately need some way of rapidly getting stuff into dynalist on mobile - email is a nice choice as there are already many third party apps which provide e.g. templates, notification shortcuts etc so you donāt have to develop that stuff yourself - Personally I would really like it to be able to send to a list, not just to a document - I think many people will be emailing to some kind of āinboxā list and for many (myself included) this will not be a standalone document but a list within a document. Multiple sending locations would be nice if possible (I do a lot of life logging and would save my time to send this stuff directly to that list rather than clogging up my inbox)
Edit: subject to bullet, content to note seems perfect to me - some way to trigger bullet colour would be nice, bit I know this would be more tricky
Further edit: top or bottom of list really needs to be an in app option in my opinion
