ActionComplete 3.2 for Web Streamlines Incoming Email Integration

Incoming email integration has been a part of ActionComplete for about two years. All that time we've been learning the usage patterns and scenarios. Relying on our findings and guided by the spirit of ActionComplete we came up to a number of simplifications and enhancements that will make your emailing experience even more pleasant.

ActionComplete is now much more tolerant to the email subject format and the characters used in it. That, combined with the recently added email acknowledgement feature, creates a robust and reliable email interface.

There are three characters that have a special meaning for ActionComplete: # denotes tags, @ is used for places and GTD-style tags such as @computer, and * specifies the task type (action, wait, project, or idea).

Tags, places, and task type are appended to the end of the email subject and are separated from one another by spaces like this:

Buy flowers #family #out and about @florist *idea

Not only does ActionComplete understand the regular hashtags, e.g. #work, but also it now allows GTD-style tags such as @phone and @computer. You can refer to a GTD-style tag with or without the hash symbol (#), i.e. #@phone and @phone are both valid provided you have @phone tag defined in ActionComplete.

To attach a place to the emailed task you use the @place notation such as @florist in the example above.

You can append up to five tags and up to five places to a task when emailing it to ActionComplete. If a tag or a place you type in the email subject does not exist in ActionComplete, it is ignored. Also please remember that tags and places are CaSe-SenSiTive.

ActionComplete now allows you to tell it what list the emailed task should go to. You can use *action, *wait, *project, and *idea notation to have ActionComplete place the task on the corresponding list. You can omit the task type altogether, in which case it'll end up on your Actions list.

You can't attach projects and people to tasks anymore as these features created some confusion and led to unexpected results.

For more information on incoming email feature please refer to the Incoming Email section of the user manual.