Turn Emails into Todoist Tasks

Postbox's Quick Post feature enables you to quickly set up and use send-to-service email addresses. Best of all, you can send content to the service in the background, without having to open up a compose window.

Using Todoist Premium or Business, you can turn emails into tasks or comments using your unique Todoist email address. Turn emails from your boss into your schedule for the day or forward reminders about kids' activities to your spouse using Todoist, and get everything done. Note: Forwarding emails is not available on the Free version of Todoist.

Find your Todoist email address

Gmail and Outlook integrations automatically turn your emails into tasks. Note: this integration doesn't allow you to send emails as comments. If you don't use Gmail or Outlook, or you want to send emails as tasks and comments, you can forward your emails to a project-specific Todoist email address.

In the web app, open the project you want to forward emails to. Click on the "…" symbol in the top right. Select "Email tasks to this project". An email address will be generated for that project. Click on "Copy to clipboard". That email address can now be set as a Quick Post.

If you want to forward emails to Todoist as a comment, in the web app, click on the comments symbol in the task or project you want to forward emails to. Then, click on the email symbol. Copy the generated email address to your clipboard.

Create your Quick Post

In Postbox, navigate to Preferences or Options > Advanced > Quick Post and then click the + button to create a new Quick Post.

Create a name for the Quick Post, then enter your Todoist email address.

Turn Emails into Todoist Tasks

You can add special characters in your subject line to specify due dates, labels, priority levels, or to assign a task to someone:

  • <due date>: Enclose a date in the chevron (<>) symbols to set a due date. Any of the Todoist date formats can be used here.
  • @label name: Add a label to the task by using the at (@) symbol, such as @travel or @work.
  • p1, p2, or p3: Give the task a priority level by including p1, p2, or p3, with p1 being the highest and p3 being the lowest priority.
  • +assignee name: Assign someone to the task on shared projects by using the plus (+) symbol followed by the name. You can use the full first and last name, the first name and last initial, or the last name only, e.g., +TommySmith, +TommyS, or +Smith.

Standard format

Email Subject: Title of task <due date> @label name p1 +assignee name

Note: The order of additions to the subject line has no impact on how Todoist reads the email. Any attachment larger than 25MB will not be attached to the task.

Nesting Quick Posts

Quick Posts can be nested by including "Parent Menu::" before the Direct Post name. For example, say you have the following Todoist projects:

  • Project 1
  • Project 2
  • Project 3

When setting up the Quick Posts for each project, you can then name them:

  • Todoist::Project 1
  • Todoist::Project 2
  • Todoist::Project 3

When you access your Quick Posts, those three options will then appear under the parent menu "Todoist". You can select one of these options under the parent menu to send the task to that project.

Specify how the message should be sent

Send As Attachment is usually the best way to go since you're forwarding the original email. Services can then do the right thing with regards to images as attachments, for instance.

Send should be used when the service doesn't know how to process .eml files as attachments, like Trello or Slack. However, it does have some limitations. For example, images embedded into the message body as an IMAP URL won't show in the destination.

Send via Compose Window will bring up the Compose Window, which you can then edit before sending. This option is also the best one to use for images embedded into the message body as an IMAP URL.

Automatic email filtering or forwarding

You can also set up Postbox's email filters to automatically trigger a Quick Post when you receive an email from a specific sender or with a particular subject.

For example, you can configure Postbox to quick post any emails sent from "Your Wife" with "Gymnastics" in the subject line to your "Family" to-do list.

To set this up, go to Postbox's Tools menu > Message Filters > New, set your filter criteria, then for the action select Quick Post and then your desired Quick Post.

But note that messages are always sent As Attachment when using a filter action because, by their nature, filter actions run in the background. So be sure to select "Send as Attachment" within the editor panel for this Quick Post.