Create Cards via Email | Hacker News Reader

Create Cards via Email

blog.trello.com

44 pointsbarryclark20 comments

I think its great that this was an intern's project at Trello and he got to announce it himself on their blog. Nice to see how much ownership they give their developers and sounds like a great internship.

Haha, I didn't realize this was a new feature. I googled this and found this feature, and was using this feature yesterday. (info was on their Support site, but not their blog) I missed my chance for sweet karma! :-)

I love trello but I still don't understand why I can't create more than 6 labels and assign my own custom colors to each label.

I don't understand why I can't remove a label from the board and have that label be removed from cards throughout the board.

I don't understand why I can't change the label's color instead of changing the color's label (if that makes any sense).

It seems easy - can anybody elaborate as to why this might be more difficult than it seems?

My instinct is that labels are an afterthought, and that if you're trying to do too much with labels, you're looking for more complexity than Trello wants to give you.

This is great, the next feature I'd love to see would be a way to update existing cards via email. The use case: I create a card by forwarding an email to my trello email address. In the meantime, the email thread continues and I have a few more updates on it. Now I want to update the Trello card with the updates from that email thread. If I just forward that email to Trello, it is now creating another new card instead of updating the existing card. Would others find this feature as useful as I would?

A great feature. We used Trello to plan our trip, but found it a bit cumbersome as a checklist of checklists (which is what we really wanted - more like Progect [1]). We had to print out all the tasks on paper, and use it as a real checklist - usable but a bit clunky.

[1] http://progect-manager.en.softonic.com/palm

I was able to do this via Zapier, but never found a solid use case for this. Do love Trello though.

Can anyone here point me to a library/framework that would allow for monitoring incoming emails (similar to this scenario) and take actions based on email address it was sent to?

Not sure of a library that would let you do it, but maybe a mail server with rules that would get triggered on mail receive. Pretty sure you can run custom scripts on a postfix server based on email content.

On the Python side there's Lamson and Google App Engine also has nice email handling capabilities allowing you to parse and access from your own code / app.

http://lamsonproject.org/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/

Looks pretty good, I will check this out in more detail! It looks like a common enough problem that I thought there would be mature frameworks around. I keep finding myself looking for a solution like this for most of my side projects..

Postmark is one I've used in the past that has an incoming mail API (in addition to outbound) that hits an endpoint you set with email data already processed for you, attachments included.

Are you language-agnostic? Ruby's mailman gem is good.

Yes, I am language agnostic. I was leaning towards Python/Ruby solutions. I will check out mailman. Thank you.

There are quite a few ways you can accomplish this with Linux + Postfix (other MTAs too) but since you have specific email addresses you want to process mail for as in this scenario the quickest way would be to have an alias[1] pipe to it to your script (language agnostic in this case). You can even use a .forward file, which might even work in the case of shared hosting.

A quick example of this for Perl is http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1030830 (replace the perl script with any program)

Another way would be to setup a transport map that targets a hook that you setup in your master.cf file but it's probably best to find more tutorials online to understand everything that is taking place.

1. If your domain is using a virtual alias then point the virtual domain's recipient to the alias.

You guys are great. Since we are building a SaaS product using a service is a good option to get us going but eventually we want to have this function in-house. I will check out all the pointers here (both service + custom solution). Thanks a lot!

We're using Mandrill - inbound email to boards.trello.com is routed to them, they parse the email into JSON, and then they POST data to us. They do spf/dkim validation for us in addition to the parsing. That said, that might be a bit heavy for your use-case.

Check out Mailgun: http://www.mailgun.com/ . It's a service rather than a library, but it handles incoming emails and has wrapper libraries in a number of languages.

We use Mailgun (Mailgun Routes) at our startup to handle email sent into the application. It works fantastic - it POSTs the email neatly structured into To, From, CC, Subject, Body etc fields and also extracts the text of the email from the Body without the signature and the quoted text which is invaluable (and isn't done by other services such as Sendgrid, Postmark, AWS etc).

They have done an amazing job with this. You can assign cards to people and even label cards through email. Sweet!

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