Turning an email into a task is a copying job. Something in a message needs doing. The mailbox is a poor place to keep that fact, so you move it somewhere with a date on it: a flag, a forwarded copy, a button in a side panel. Every product named below makes that same copy. If you’ve tried two of them and drifted back to the mailbox, the reason is in the documentation rather than in you. What separates them is how much survives the trip, and what the two halves know about each other afterward, which in almost every case is nothing at all. Every limit and quoted line here comes from the vendor’s own documentation, read September 6, 2026.
- The task list inside Outlook is Microsoft To Do, and a flag is the bridge into it. Microsoft publishes two limits that decide this for a professional firm. The flagged email list works only on mailboxes Microsoft hosts. Mail flagged in a shared mailbox stays in the shared mailbox.
- Gmail’s equivalent is Google Tasks. The part worth having is a button on the task that takes you back to the message it came from.
- Every task app also gives you an address to forward to, and the address is where the losses are. Things ignores attachments and truncates anything past 4,000 characters. Trello caps the whole email at 10 MB. Todoist parks the body in a comment as an attachment rather than reading it.
- The trip runs one way, almost everywhere. Finish the task and the message sits where it was. Answer the message and the task stays open. That’s how a two-partner firm ends up reconciling two lists on a Friday evening.
- All of it fires on mail you’ve already read and already decided about. A bridge copies what you’ve noticed. The message that costs you a client is the one you never reached.
What the copy actually carries
Four different companies describe this the same way, which is the fastest route to what you’re buying.
Asana: “Your subject line will turn into the task name, while the body of the email will become the task description.” Trello: “The subject of the email becomes the card’s title”, and “The body of the email becomes the card’s description.” Cultured Code, on Mail to Things: “The subject becomes your to-do’s title, and the body is your note.” Todoist is the odd one out only in where it puts the second half: “the subject line will become the task name, and the body of the email will be added as an attachment in a comment.”
So the task is named after the subject line. That sounds harmless until you read a real one. “RE: FW: Q3” is the name of a thread. Six weeks later it’s the name of a task, and acting on it means opening something else first. Why the packaging makes such a poor label, and what a task has to carry instead, is worked through in one summary for a thread, its files and its tasks.
Three things stay behind in every one of them.
The date. A message says “we need this before the committee meets on the 19th”. Every one of these leaves the 19th in the sentence. The date on the task is the one you type. Todoist is the single exception on this page, and it’s metered. Email Assist pulls dates and times out of a forwarded email and rewrites the task name. Todoist states that “It’s available on Pro and Business plans only and isn’t included in the Pro Legacy plan.”
The rest of the thread. The copy comes from one message. The three messages above it, where the scope was actually agreed, stay in the mailbox.
Everything the thread does next. This is the quiet one. The task is a photograph, taken the moment you filed it. The client replies on Thursday and moves the deadline. The task still says what it said on Tuesday. Trello is the only vendor here that publishes a fix, and the fix has a shelf life: “Any reply in that email thread that includes the board email address is added to the card as a comment instead of creating a new card. This lasts for 7 days.”
Seven days is an honest number, and it’s worth sitting with. A vendor that has thought carefully about this problem gives the connection between a thread and a task one week to live.
The task list already inside Outlook
This is where most of the searching starts. The answer changed recently, and a lot of what’s written about it still describes the older one, so it’s worth being precise about what exists today.
The Tasks module is still there. Microsoft’s own feature comparison between new Outlook and classic Outlook lists it as available in both. What changed is the engine underneath. Microsoft’s page on assigning tasks puts it plainly: “In classic Outlook, you can create tasks for yourself that appear in your To-Do Bar, plus you can assign tasks to other people. Tasks you assign to others can be tracked in your To-Do Bar.” And then, of everything newer: “In new Outlook, and Microsoft 365, tasks are displayed with My Day and managed with the To Do app.”
Two consequences for a small firm follow from that sentence, and they run in opposite directions.
Handing a task to a colleague, with tracking, is described on the classic Outlook page. Say your office manager assigns work to two juniors through Outlook tasks, and somebody is planning a move to new Outlook. That’s the capability to ask about before the move rather than after.
The bridge from mail into the list is the flag. Microsoft publishes three limits on it, and they matter more than any feature.
It works only on mailboxes Microsoft hosts. “This feature is only available if you’re using an account that’s hosted by Microsoft, such as an Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, or Live.com account. It’s also available if you’re using an account hosted by Microsoft but using a custom domain.” Most firms on Microsoft 365 with their own domain sit inside that, which is the good news. A firm whose mail is hosted somewhere else and merely read in Outlook sits outside it.
Shared mailboxes are outside it. “Only emails flagged from your primary mailbox will sync with Flagged email folder in To Do. Flagged emails from shared folders and shared mailboxes are not supported.” For a practice that runs client correspondence through an address like info@ or tax@, this is the whole game. The flag reaches your own mailbox, and the address the firm actually publishes sits beyond its reach. What a shared address gives you, and where it stops, is weighed in alternatives to a shared inbox.
A flagged calendar item stays a calendar item. “Flagged calendar events won’t be converted to tasks in To Do and won’t appear in the flagged email list.”
One more line from the same page is quietly revealing: “Items in the flagged email list can be renamed, assigned due dates and reminders, added to My Day, and marked as important.” Every one of those is an edit you make yourself. The flag hands you a copy of the subject line, and the date, the priority and the name are yours to add, with four controls for adding them. That’s fine. It’s also why the list fills up with entries nobody can read.
Where Point sits against the rest of the Outlook experience, rather than just its task list, is in Point vs Outlook.
Gmail’s version, which is a shorter trip
Google Tasks is the same shape with one better detail and one worse one.
Google’s help documentation lists it as able to “Create tasks from Google Workspace products like Gmail and Calendar”. The Tasks side panel appears in Gmail, Calendar, Chat, Drive and inside Docs, Sheets and Slides files. That reach lands as worse than Outlook for some firms and better for others. It’s a Google surface, present wherever Google is and only there.
The better detail is the link. Google’s own announcement of the feature says that “when you visit your Tasks to-do list, there will be a button that takes you directly back to the email, in case you need a reminder about the context.” That button is the single most useful thing on this whole page. It’s the one piece of the connection that a vendor kept. The task knows which message it came from.
The knowing still runs one way. The task knows its message, and the message goes on as though the task were never made. Even so, a task that can show you its own source is doing better than a task named “RE: FW: Q3” sitting in a different vendor’s product.
Point vs Gmail covers how the rest of the Gmail experience compares, including what happens to labels.
The address every task app gives you
If your firm’s list lives outside your mail provider, the bridge is an email address. Each vendor draws the boundary in a different place.
Asana. “Forward any email to x@mail.asana.com. This creates a task (assigned to you) in the Asana workspace associated with your email address.” The task lands in My Tasks rather than in a project. It’s captured, and somebody still has to file it. The address is derived from your Asana login, so the account you forward from is what gives the task an owner.
Trello. Every member gets their own address per board, and Trello is unusually direct about what that address is: “Your unique board and card email addresses are only visible to you. If you share them, other people can create cards or comments as you.” So the address is a credential. Attachments do come across, which is more than most manage: “Attachments in the email are added as attachments to the card.” The ceiling is a hard one, “There is an overall email size limit of 10 MB including attachments”, and a scanned tax return will pass that on an ordinary day. And Trello states that “When you send an email to Trello, a copy is kept on our servers for 90 days.”
Things. A private address tied to Things Cloud, and the most honest limit list of anybody. The address takes 100 emails in a 24-hour period. Anything longer than 4,000 characters is truncated. “File attachments are not supported and will be ignored”. Plain text is what arrives, unless the formatting is Markdown. The address can be replaced if it leaks, and the old one “will stop working immediately”. Two practical notes before it goes on a shortlist. Things is listed for Mac, iPhone, Apple Watch, iPad and Vision Pro, with no Windows or Android version named, so a mixed office rules it out on its own. And its pricing page publishes no number at all: “Please check your App Store to find out how much Things costs in your country.”
Todoist. Subject becomes the task name, and the body arrives as an attachment in a comment rather than as readable text in the task. That distinction earns its keep. The task, as it appears in your list, is a subject line and a paperclip. Email Assist is the paid upgrade that fixes it, on Pro and Business only. Todoist’s free tier also carries structural limits worth knowing before a firm builds on it. They’re published as 5 personal projects, 3 filter views and 1 week of activity history, against 300 projects and 150 filter views on Pro.
Read those four side by side and a pattern shows up. The vendors who publish the tightest limits, Things and Trello, are the ones who have thought hardest about the bridge. Read silence from the others as silence.
The add-in, and its own seams
An add-in inside the mail app is the closest anybody gets to the two systems talking. Todoist’s Outlook integration is worth reading closely, because it documents its seams instead of hiding them.
The link on the task is the interesting one. “Todoist tasks created with the integration will contain a link back to the Outlook email. This link opens the Outlook web app where you can view the email.” So the connection exists. Following it lands you in a browser, rather than in the client you were working in. That’s the disconnect in its most literal form: a bridge that puts you down on a different bank.
Three more published conditions decide whether it’s even an option. “If add-ins are disabled or you’re using a personal IMAP or POP3 email account, the integration won’t work”, which leaves it to firms whose mail is on a supported Microsoft service, with web add-ins switched on by the administrator. The supported desktop versions are Outlook 2019 or later on Windows and Outlook 2016 or later on macOS. And there’s a maintenance cost that stays out of the demo: “After logging in successfully, Microsoft Outlook will prompt you to enter your login credentials every three months.” Four times a year, for every person who uses it, somebody signs in again or quietly stops using the thing.
Where the two stop talking
Everything above is a way of getting an ask out of the mailbox. Here’s where each one stops, and that list is the actual subject of this page.
The trip is one way. Every vendor documents mail becoming a task. Every one of them leaves the mail exactly as it found it. Mark it done and the message is still sitting there. Answer the message and the task is still open. Two records of one obligation. Both confident, each working alone.
Somebody has to reconcile them, and nobody scheduled that. In practice it happens at the end of a bad week. It takes a while, because deciding whether an open task has already been dealt with means reading the thread it came from. That’s the real cost of the disconnect, and it’s paid in the hours you were trying to save.
The task is frozen while the thread moves on. A message that says “before the 19th” becomes a card that says “before the 19th” forever. The client moves it to the 26th in a reply you’ve both read, and the card holds its ground.
The name is the packaging. Four vendors, one design, and the subject line was written to route a message rather than to describe a job.
The date is yours to type. A list of undated tasks is an inventory. Where a date can legitimately come from, including the ones nobody wrote down, is set out in email task management without writing it down.
It fires on mail you already handled. This is the failure that actually costs money, and it’s structural rather than a shortcoming of any one product. A flag, a forward and an add-in button are all things you do to a message you’ve read and understood well enough to decide it matters. The request buried three paragraphs into a thread about something else, on a day with ninety other real messages, sits there waiting. You never got that far. The same limit, in a product built entirely out of these instruments, is examined in Point vs Boomerang.
Waiting on somebody leaves you nothing to copy. You asked the client on Tuesday and Thursday is quiet. The message you’d flag is the one you’re waiting for, and it’s still out there. Where that obligation actually lives, and what brings it back, is unanswered emails and the threads that come back.
The copy of client mail you just made
This deserves its own section for a professional firm. A forwarding address is a data transfer, and it feels like a keyboard shortcut.
Forward a client’s message to a task tool, and that client’s words, and possibly their attachments, are now inside a second company’s systems. What you agreed about your mailbox stays with the mailbox. So does your engagement letter, and so do your provider’s terms. Trello, to its credit, tells you exactly what happens next: “When you send an email to Trello, a copy is kept on our servers for 90 days.” Most vendors stay quiet.
Two more details from the same documentation are worth reading as security facts rather than as features. A Trello board address, shared, lets “other people create cards or comments as you”. A Things address is private, and if it leaks the answer is a new one, after which the old address “will stop working immediately”. Both of those write into your firm’s system of record. Both sit in the address book of whoever you last forwarded from.
The questions to put in writing to any vendor, before a mailbox full of client files is connected to it, are in what to ask about client confidentiality. The version of that conversation aimed at an accounting or advisory practice specifically is the questions to ask about client data.
When a bridge is genuinely the right answer
Said once, because it’s true for a real share of the people reading this.
Say the work that comes out of your email is project work. It has a plan, dependencies, several people and a client who can see the board. Then the task belongs in the project tool, and a forwarding address is doing exactly the job it was built for. Everything on this page holds with that. A firm running delivery in Asana or Trello wants the ask to land there, imperfect name and all, because that’s the one place the rest of the team can see it.
The same goes for a firm where somebody genuinely assigns and tracks work through Outlook tasks. That’s a real workflow with real reporting behind it, and a tool that manages your own list leaves it standing.
This page is about a different case. An owner, or a two-partner practice. The work arrives as sentences in other people’s messages. The day’s mail is more than anybody can read carefully. The list is organized fine; things never reach it at all.
Keeping the ask and the thread as one thing
Point comes at this from the other end. The ask stays part of the message, so the two arrive together and stay together, and there’s nothing to reconcile.
- When a message asks something of you, it becomes a dated task by itself. The task is drawn from what the message actually asks, rather than from its subject line.
- It happens on mail that’s still unopened, which is the whole structural difference from a flag. The noticing is Point’s job.
- The thread, its attachment, the meeting it produced and the task it produced open as one thing, in place. What’s in front of you is the whole situation, rather than a line of text.
- Tasks from every conversation, and from every business you run, gather into one list you can work through.
- Something you handed off, or asked for and are still waiting on, is tracked and returned to you at the point where chasing it still does some good. Point holds the waiting, where a flag needs a message to sit on.
- Point’s judgment is written into the mailbox itself, into real Gmail labels, with archiving that carries both ways. A thread you clear in Point is clear where you read mail next. Your work stays in your own mailbox.
For a firm holding client information, the question that settles this is the autonomy rather than the task capture. How far the software may go on its own is a setting rather than a promise. The autonomy dial runs per action type, from suggest-only through review to fully handled. Review is where it ships, so Point prepares the work and waits for you. You raise the kinds you have decided you trust, one at a time. The top setting has Point acting without checking first, which is why the dial has more than one position. Underneath it sits an activity log in ordinary sentences naming the thread each action touched, and most of what Point did comes back with one click. The autonomy dial covers how the levels behave and the record of what was done covers what the log holds.
Two honest limits. Point is a mail client. Dependencies, a client-visible board and a resource plan stay with the project tool, and a firm that needs those still wants the one it has. And undo covers what Point did inside your account, so a sent email stays sent on somebody else’s server. Point connects to the Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox you already have and keeps your address. It’s in private beta on per-seat pricing that stays unpublished while that lasts. Every product named above publishes terms you can read this afternoon, which is a real difference.
What the first week of a change like this actually involves is in switching to an AI email client.
What to settle before you wire anything up
Each of these is answerable from a documentation page and ten minutes with your own mailbox, and a single answer can close the whole question.
- Where does the mail that matters arrive? If it lands in a shared address, Microsoft states that flagged mail from shared mailboxes stays out of To Do, and most forwarding bridges assume a personal account. Answer this one first, because it eliminates options rather than ranking them.
- Who hosts the mailbox? Microsoft’s flagged email list needs an account Microsoft hosts. Todoist’s Outlook integration needs a supported Microsoft service, and a personal IMAP or POP3 account falls outside that. Both checked September 6, 2026.
- Does anybody assign work to anybody? Assigning and tracking tasks is described on Microsoft’s classic Outlook page. If that’s how your office manager works, ask about it before a version change rather than after.
- Who is going to type the dates? On Todoist Pro or Business with Email Assist, the software reads them out of the message. Everywhere else the answer is a person, on every task, forever.
- How big are the attachments? Trello caps an emailed card at 10 MB including attachments. Things ignores attachments entirely. A firm that lives on scanned documents has just narrowed the field.
- Who reconciles the two lists, and when? If the honest answer is nobody, what you’re buying is a second inbox with worse names in it.
- What did you just send to a third party? A forwarded client email is a copy in another company’s hands. Trello keeps its copy for 90 days and says so. Get the same answer in writing from whoever else you’re considering.
- Is the real problem capture or noticing? If the tasks you lose are ones you flagged and forgot, a better list fixes it. If they’re ones you never saw, every bridge on this page starts after the point where you lost them, and you’re shopping in the wrong category.
Common questions
How do I create a task from an email in Outlook?
There are two documented routes and they end up in different places. Flagging a message puts it in the Flagged email list in Microsoft To Do, where Microsoft says items “can be renamed, assigned due dates and reminders, added to My Day, and marked as important”. The Tasks module is the other route, listed by Microsoft as available in both classic and new Outlook. Microsoft also states that “In new Outlook, and Microsoft 365, tasks are displayed with My Day and managed with the To Do app.” Both checked September 6, 2026. One limit to know before you rely on either: flagging crosses over on mailboxes Microsoft hosts, and from your primary mailbox only.
Is there a task list inside Outlook, or do I need another app?
There’s one, and it’s Microsoft To Do wearing an Outlook interface. Microsoft’s feature comparison lists the Tasks module as available in both classic and new Outlook. The To-Do Bar is the classic Outlook surface, with My Day as the newer one, checked September 6, 2026. For a solo practitioner whose mail is on Microsoft 365 and whose tasks are all their own, it’s genuinely enough, and it costs nothing extra. It reaches its edge at the point where work arrives in a shared address, or where somebody needs to hand a task to somebody else with tracking on it.
Why do my flagged emails not show up in Microsoft To Do?
The two published reasons account for most cases. The first is the account: “This feature is only available if you’re using an account that’s hosted by Microsoft, such as an Outlook.com, Hotmail.com, or Live.com account. It’s also available if you’re using an account hosted by Microsoft but using a custom domain.” The second is where you flagged it: “Only emails flagged from your primary mailbox will sync with Flagged email folder in To Do. Flagged emails from shared folders and shared mailboxes are not supported.” Microsoft also states that flagged calendar events stay calendar events. All checked September 6, 2026.
Can I forward an email straight into Todoist, Asana or Trello?
Yes, and all three work the same way with different edges. Asana: “Forward any email to x@mail.asana.com. This creates a task (assigned to you) in the Asana workspace associated with your email address.” Trello gives each member a private address per board, and warns that anybody you share it with “can create cards or comments as you”. A 10 MB ceiling covers the whole email. Todoist turns the subject into the task name and files the body as an attachment in a comment. On Pro or Business with Email Assist, it reads dates out of the message as well. All checked September 6, 2026.
Does finishing the task do anything to the email?
No, and this is the gap the whole page is about. Every vendor here documents an email becoming a task. Each one leaves the message exactly as it was, and a reply leaves the task open. You get two records of one obligation, and the work of keeping them honest is yours. It’s also why the number of task tools a small firm has abandoned is usually larger than the number it has bought.
What is the best way to turn an email into a task?
For a solo practitioner on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace whose work is all their own, use the list already inside the mail account. It costs nothing and the trip is short. Google Tasks has the better version of the link, with a button that takes you “directly back to the email”. For a firm running client delivery in a project tool, use the forwarding address into that tool, accepting the subject-line name and typing the date. For a practice where asks never reach a list at all, both of those start with you noticing, which is the point where the trouble began.
Do I still need a separate task app if the software finds the tasks for me?
Many firms do, and the reason sits outside email entirely. A project tool holds a plan: phases, dependencies, who owns what, a view a client can be shown. A mail client holds obligations, which is a different thing and a smaller one. When the mail client finds the ask, what changes is how much the project tool has to be told by hand, which is most of the typing. The tasks you think of yourself, that were never in any message, are a separate problem again, and they’re covered in adding a task in five seconds.
Is it safe to forward client email into a task tool?
It’s a decision to make deliberately, rather than an obviously bad one. Forwarding moves client content into a second vendor, under terms you may never have read, and outside whatever you agreed for the mailbox. Trello publishes its retention. “When you send an email to Trello, a copy is kept on our servers for 90 days”, checked September 6, 2026. The practical test is simple. Could you answer, in writing and today, where a forwarded client message is stored, for how long, and who else can reach it? If that’s a shrug for a tool your firm already uses, it’s worth resolving before you add another one.
The short version
- Every bridge does the same copy. Asana, Trello and Things all make the subject line the task name and the body the description or note. Todoist files the body as an attachment in a comment. All checked September 6, 2026.
- Microsoft’s flagged email list works only on mailboxes Microsoft hosts, and from your primary mailbox only. For a firm whose client mail arrives at a published address, that one line decides it.
- Google Tasks has the best-preserved connection on this page, a button on the task that goes back to the email, and it still runs in one direction.
- The published limits are the useful part of the documentation. Things ignores attachments and truncates past 4,000 characters. Trello caps the email at 10 MB, keeps a copy for 90 days, and gives a thread-to-card link exactly seven days to live.
- An add-in is the closest thing to a real bridge, and it still has seams. Todoist’s Outlook link opens the Outlook web app, needs an account beyond personal IMAP or POP3, and asks for credentials again every three months.
- The return trip is yours. Finish the task and the mail sits where it was. Answer the mail and the task stays open. Somebody reconciles two lists by reading threads.
- Every one of these fires on a message you’ve already read. If the asks you lose are the ones you never reached, a better list arrives after the loss.
If what you’re actually weighing is the client rather than the list, that’s a different shortlist and it’s in alternatives to Superhuman for small firms. If the mail arrives sorted and the week still runs you, the category question is settled in an AI email client versus an AI email assistant.
Every capability written out plainly, with nothing pitched, is on the benefits page, and the home page walks one ordinary Tuesday morning end to end. That answers more than a comparison table does. The same morning is written in the vocabulary of an accounting or tax practice and of the other trades this was built around.