Send emails to create cards

Setup

Your board can transform emails to cards automatically. To enable the feature, go to the Board tools > Extension menu and click on Send emails to board > Setup :

In the dialog that opens, enable the feature. You can change the email address if you want. Like every email address, you expose yourself to spam if you make it public. We do have a spam filter though but can't guarantee it will always succeed :

And that's it. Send emails to this address and Klaro Cards will convert them to cards in your board.

Default mapping

By default, the mapping below applies. The following sections explain how you can go further and have dimensions auto-filled on your cards.

Email attachments

This panel allows you to manage email attachements:

• The first option simply sets every email attachment as a card attachment
• The second option saves the email and all attachments as a single .eml file

Activating both options doubles the storage required for your card, avoid having both enabled unless striclty required.

Setting dimension values (Processing)

Of course you may want to go a bit further and automatically categorize your cards by using the power of Klaro Cards dimensions. There are three ways to do that : via the board filters, a YAML frontmatter or an Elo script.

Board filters

As usual in Klaro Cards, the board filters provide the default values that will be used when creating new cards. This means that if you send emails to a board that set specific values to specific dimensions, your card will be automatically enriched, without further effort.

For instance, if the filters shown above are part of the board definition, then any email sent to that board will create cards with the following dimensions set :

YAML Frontmatter

It is sometimes useful to let the incoming email define the card dimensions. The previous technique is of no help in such a case. For this reason, Klaro Cards supports a data frontmatter in the email body, very much inspired by standard techniques at Github, Jekyll or Astro.

Klaro Cards recognizes a valid frontmatter in the email body, that maps dimension names to dimension values. For instance, an email whose body looks like this:

---
Category: Discover
Progress: Todo
---
And some text

Will yield the following mapping:

The frontmatter has high precedence and will override the default mapping. This way you can choose the card title and subtitle if you wish. For instance, the following email body lets you choose the card title entirely and bypass the card subtitle:

---
Card title: A brilliant idea
Card subtitle:
---
And some text

Elo Script

If you want to go further, for example include logic to set dimension values, you have the opportunity to write a small Elo script.
The expression must return a card Tuple whose keys are your dimension codes, and whose values are either values (date, number) or the identifier or label of a value (for all other dimensions, for example your own lists).
For example, if you have a Priority dimension and a Department dimension, you could do this:

{
  priority: if contains(_.subject, 'urgent') then 'High' else 'Normal',
  department: 'HR'
}

Elo's expression input, namely _, does not represent a card (as you might be used to with computed dimensions), but an email being processed. It has the following Schema and autocompletion in Klaro Cards will help you selecting the fields.

Address = {
  address :? String
  name    : String
}

Email = {
  subject     :? String
  from        :? { value: [Address], text: String }
  to          :? { value: [Address], text: String }
  cc          :? { value: [Address], text: String }
  date        :? Datetime
  messageId   :? String
  inReplyTo   :? String
  text        :? String
  html        :? String
  attachments :? [{ filename :? String, contentType: String, size: Int }]
}

For the keys of your card Tuple, check the dimension and value codes in their configuration screen:

Frequently asked questions

• How many email can I send to my board ?

  There is no hard limit and our architecture is built to scale. If you plan to use the feature massively, please contact our support team so that we can adjust your settings for the best experience possible.

• Can I have email attachements automatically attached to my cards ?

  Yes, please simply contact the support, so we can check your security settings to avoid you to overwhelm your data usage.

• Can I go beyond what's presented here to auto-categorize my cards ?

  Of course. Please contact the support, we can read Excel attachments, ask AI to auto-categorize based on the content, or anything else you'd like.

Summary

• Create an email per board by enabling the extension.
• Be aware that this may expose your board to spam.
• Board filters automatically enrich cards, use that !
• Create multiple enrichment setups with different boards, each with an email address.
• Use the data frontmatter to let the sender touch specific dimensions if they want to.
• Think twice before making your email address public as it might be a security issue.
• Think about using this feature with tools like Tally.so if you want to collect info publicly.