Show HN: Planleaf – Manage tasks completely over email | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Planleaf – Manage tasks completely over email

planleaf.com

76 pointsramoq41 comments

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Really awesome!

My account managers just said "That's awesome! I'll use the s* out of that!"

We're willing to be on the beta of the business version!

If multiple people send me tasks, does it condense my to-do lists into one to-do list?

bwalker at kouponmedia.com

Thanks!! I'll be emailing you momentarily

Can task statuses be updated through e-mail? I don't see anything mentioned about it. I work on a team where it's typical to respond to the email when something is done instead of going to the web. There are many different ways it can be noted so I'm interested in how that would be solved.

This could be the "bookkeeper" of the e-mail chain of tasks and statuses.

If by task status you mean complete/uncomplete, yes - just click the checkbox next to the task or the edit button. If you mean custom statuses like "in progress", it's possible, but there hasn't been enough demand for it for us to add that functionality.

I found working on the todo list myself very easy, however I wanted to involve another person in the 'send me a tasklist' list and couldn't.

I tried: - Add a new task with a @help at the end, CC them in along with the @planleaf.com email - Add a new task with a @help@example.com at the end, CC @planleaf.com

Both didn't work and I received no email from Planleaf to say that it couldn't be parsed.

Creating a new list, CC tasks@planleaf.com and help@example.com did work.

Is adding a new assignee after the list has been created supported?

That's my criticism with managing tasks through email: input validation and feedback isn't seamless. In an app UI this is instant. From what I've seen Planleaf doesn't give me feedback if I type something incorrectly.

As email is much more freeform than a form that's a barrier to being simple and intuitive. Not an insurmountable one, but I think you need to do a little more hand holding.

That said, it's a great idea with promising execution and something I've mulled over building for our marketplace.

Hi drsim, our current version doesn't have support adding people midway through a list. However, our version in dev does along additional help/tutorials. This is our MVP of Planleaf

I think we totally need to add more feedback for the user input as best as we can. We're even toying with adding a web-version of our product for power users. So web -> email will be very seamless.

Really appreciate the feecback, ping me at omar at planleaf.com if you have any other suggestions/concerns. I'm all ears :)

It looks like a great MVP Omar, I'll be keeping an eye out for updates!

Many of our customers are non-technical so a feedback loop with clear messaging is essential for us.

Used this for starting a quick ToDo list between friends over the weekend.

I really like how this allows me to quickly collaborate with people across different platforms (and devices) without needing them to go through a signup process.

I work in a huge enterprise that will not allow any company data on third party servers. I also am constantly in need of ways to collaborate with team members on multiple different projects. But, I can't use any hosted webapps and have no way to set up my own instance within our company.

If there was an on-premise whitelabel version of this, and my colleagues and I could create new shared task lists for each project without having to install anything, that would be amazing.

I recognize that this is just the MVP, but consider this a suggestion for later if you want to scale this up and add an Enterprise tier.

Hi mattkopecki, our enterprise/business version will be just that. You can host it internally and have tasks@mybigco.com as your internal hook for tasks

great suggestion, ping me at omar at planleaf dot com if there is anything else you would like to see in an enterprise tier.

Very nice, I love the seamless use on mobile gmail.

However, does every interaction result in an immediate status update email, or are they 'chunked' together at all?

We debated over this, we want to group multiple together (waiting a bit before sending the update to see if any others come in), but people love the "instant feedback" of the update coming right away.

What we plan to do is have the first update come instantly, but then any subsequent ones would get grouped together. That way you still get the instant feedback 90% of the time but at the same time you don't get flooded if someone decides to do a lot of changes in a short time.

Ah. Seems reasonable. You could probably tweak the timing (updates no more often than every X minutes) and volume (no more than Y changes per update) dynamically with things like an exponential backoff (to some limit) to optimize engagement over time.

The ideal knob settings may change depending on whether people are trying to collaborate synchronously or asynchronously. BTW, are you currently doing diff-match-patch to account for multiple editors?

ramoq: I haven't tried it, but what if someone spoofs the from address? For example, if I used the old telnet to port 25 trick, could I create a task from billg@microsoft.com to larry@google.com? I have a feeling that since it may be re-routed through planleaf (is it?) that the destination server may not be able to validate the from address.

Looks a lot like http://task.li/

I happen to know the team behind task.li - all extraordinarily competent. They completely rewrote it a couple of times until the backend as well as the frontend was not only smart, but also fast and highly reliable for different inputs and user agents.

Kudos for the competition, too(;

We're familiar with task.li :) I think the two products share some similarities but are starkly different in their execution. Planleaf has made an entire task management ecosystem _completely_ inside of email. This is where we shine, we leverage your email client to facilitate our app.

But yes, competition is always fantastic.

So you 'check' your tasks inside the mail app?

Does that mean:

* You need a GUI mail client?

* You cannot share the task list with other people? If you can, how do you handle propagating the state of a task (done/undone) to multiple people?

Oh, that's a good point. I suspect that it won't work with Pine/Mutt or commandline email handling (vim+mail?). What about clients that don't support (or have disabled) html email?

EDIT: Added "Mutt" and non-html email question.

From their sample email: "This is the plain text version of the email. Please enable HTML to be able to interact with the list"

Pretty cool - I was happy to see it worked with HTML bulleted lists. Most managers I know don't use plain text emails.

I'm not entirely sure that the use of the '-' char is a good idea .. isn't this, or rather the '--' variation of it, something from SMTP, for use in separating mail content from the signature? I guess I should test it and find out .. hope it doesn't try to get my signature done! :)

Yes, double dash '--' is the signature character which is different enough from '-' to detect. But even if you use '-' as the signature separator, we have a pretty good signature detection algorithm that would remove it.

A great idea. And very well executed! One thing though, for some reason emails from the same list does not group together in my Outlook 2013, like "RE:" and "FW:" mails do. (In other words: The "Show as Conversations"-option doesn't seem to work on emails from Planleaf)

Love the idea and execution :)

The idea of it sounds horrible to me. I want less email, not more. Getting a daily digest and managing to-dos via email in general doesn't appeal to me.

Clever how you do task management using email rather than an app or chrome extension. Any reason why you chose email over the other approaches?

At a guess I'd say ubiquity and path of least resistance.

Many places I've worked email has been the defacto ad-hoc task distribution system for years.

Thanks! We wanted to remove all barriers of collaboration. It's friction-less using Planleaf, you need nothing other then an email to get going :)

I really like this. I work for an NGO that does work all over the world and I can see something like this being really useful for areas that have bandwidth concerns!

Nice idea!

On backend, how do you authenticate the email sender? Would someone be able to flood a task list by spoofing an email ID?

We check email headers and have a few other factors to determine if the sender is genuine or spoofed. You would be able to create a new task list with a spoofed address, but you can't spoof your address to add to someone else's list.

Am I the only one getting "Server not found"? :(

everything looks good on our end. Try again

So weird... `dig` properly resolves planleaf.com to an IP, I can ping that IP but both Fx and Chrome say "Server not found" ... :D

Integration with IDoneThis would be awesome.

Can't find pricing...? Am I blind?

You're not blind, lol. We're launching a business tier next which we'll charge for :)

+1 for having a business model. Too often I see great tools disappear because they got acquired, ran out of funding or something. I'd love to see this be an example of a tool that makes enough money to sustain it's team.

the task email froze my claws-mail in html view. js and pictures are disabled for html view.

Let me take a look into that for you. TBH, never heard of claws-mail until now :p

thank you, claws is an excellent email client

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