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 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.

Setting dimension values

Of course you may want to go a bit further and automatically categorize your cards by using the power of Klaro dimensions. The are two ways to do that : via the board filters or a frontmatter.

Board filters

As usual in Klaro, 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 :

Frontmatter

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

Klaro 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

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 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 board filters and frontmatter 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.
• This twice before making your email address public as it might be a security issue.
• This about using this feature with tools like Tally.so if you want to collect info publicly.