[From Wrike] Email Communication With Non-Wrike Users 📧

Hi Community!

We are so excited to announce the latest release from our Product team - email communication with non-Wrike users 🔥 You can now communicate with external people outside of your Wrike account by receiving and sending emails directly from Wrike tasks to external email addresses.

This has been one of the most demanded feature requests in the Product Feedback forum and we are happy to deliver it to you today! Thank you, everyone, who has participated in the beta testing, shared their feedback on the Community thread, and supported the idea with their upvotes, we appreciate your contributions 🙌🏼

How to start using email communication with external users?

To make this feature available in your account, you'd need to set your external request forms to allow email communication. After changing the settings whenever a person submits a request form, Wrike users can start communicating on the task created with the external requesters via email and vice versa.

📖 You can find detailed instructions on how to set up email communications in our Help Center.

Adjust your Request Forms to allow email communication
Email communication for Wrike Users
Email communication for external requesters

📍Please note:

Email communication is only available in tasks or task- and project-based custom item types that were created from external request forms set to allow email communication.

As always, please don't hesitate to share your feedback or questions in the comments below. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts 👀

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Comments

Michele DeFilippo

So glad to hear this is now available, thank you! I see the instructions cover all possible cases, but our needs are probably simpler...just two situations. What's the best way to get specific help to set this up?

Meredith Selden

Thank you!! 🙌

Aloi Calvert

This is awesome! Thank you!

Sven Passinger

A nice little start. But why with the request form? Just allow mail communication for every task. That would be a step forward.

As we do not involve customers into Wrike, but having communication with suppliers about tasks, that would help.

In our case suppliers do not make any tasks, but project managers doing this normaly in Wrike. It would be a great help if they could communicate out of Wrike with neccesary contributors about a task they created.

Julien Thiery

Nice MVP, glad to see this live.

Looking forward being able to bcc. additional external watcher participants, (even better: let the requester add himself the participants in the request form) as well as being able to decide if external people get notified of status changes (that gives them visibility when the tickets is being addressed).

Julien Thiery

In the past, it was always a pain to anticipate who will use the form to create the Collaborator. Now at least we can address this ticket, not blocking initial interraction.

It would be awesome for Wrike User, to "Submit collaborator creation request" directly from the tasks, that would notify Wrike Admin, and let wrike admin automatically approve a new wrike collaborator to be created.

Ronald Otmar Theil

Great feature for the first launch.
But I agree with the previous speakers. We need this feature in an existing project/task, not via a request form.
We don't want to involve our customers in Wrike, we want to communicate with them through the tasks.
So it would be a great help if the project managers could communicate from Wrike with the necessary contributors/customers via a task they created.

Florian Kislich

a big step forward! 😃

Robert Reiss

That is super amazing, thank you guys for listening to your users!

😀

Michele DeFilippo

A great start, but as others have said, a few glitches need to be ironed out.

Having to create and send a form to someone so they can participate in a task is an unnecessary step.

It's a big step forward for "outsiders" to be able to participate in a task without having to create an account, Yay! It would be even better to be able to customize the email subject line, either once or each time, to identify that the message came from us. The current subject line generated by the system is meaningless and could be interpreted as spam.

Cody Rogers

This is great! We've already implemented it within 3 of our forms and are looking forward to future use cases as well!

@Michele DeFilippo I'm assuming you can't change the subject line so that it appears within the original email conversation the submitter gets after submitting the form, because the replies do not show the task/project name. So this is the best way to make sure the person you're replying to knows what you're referencing (unless of course they delete that confirmation email), but that's just my guess as to why it's done that way.

Shelly Erickson

Passing this to the group. I know we wanted to look at this for help desk tickets but thinking this still may not suffice.

Tara Miller

I was so excited to hear that this feature has been released. I agree with many of the comments above about this being a good first step, but unfortunately it doesn't seem like it's going to be helpful for us.

We're brand new to Wrike, and when we were shopping for a project management system just a couple of months ago, having a fully integrated email feature was non-negotiable for us and we mentioned that on our first sales call with Wrike. Emails are the primary form of communication we have with all our stakeholders and lots of information is shared back & forth throughout a project, and that information needs to “live” in the project so we can easily keep track of it all.

Here is what we want to be able to do with emails within our project management system.

Email and track all email communications with our clients & collaborators within the relevant Wrike project, no matter which task it relates to
Emails are allowed to be sent from any team member’s email address
Reply emails can be sent from within Wrike as well as from a person’s email program (e.g., Gmail)

We're now realizing that unfortunately it falls far short of what we had understood this feature was going to allow.

I'm wondering if anyone has other workarounds that would accomplish the above? We’ve installed the Wrike for Gmail extension and that is somewhat helpful, but it's glitchy and limited. I'm also aware that there is a permalink for each task and that if you email to that permalink, it shows up in the activity feed. However, this involves finding the appropriate task in Wrike, opening it, copying the permalink, going back into email, pasting the permalink and then sending. I think this is something I can probably get into a routine doing, but I’m not sure my teammates and collaborators will remember so we’d still be losing communications on that thread.

Thank you!

Michele DeFilippo

Thanks for the reply, Cody Rogers. That is what's happening, but from our customer's point of view, imagine receiving 200 emails during a project with a title like "Your request successfully submitted (Ref #941068686)". Neither our company name nor their project name is in the subject line, so I can easily imagine clients deleting these messages unopened or blocking them as spam. Sigh. If the system were to pick up the task name as the email subject, or we could define the email subject line when setting up the original request form, that would do.

Cansu Yetisgin

Hi everyone, thank you so much for the feedback you've been sharing here, we appreciate it. I'm passing all your suggestions and thoughts to the team👍🏼

Cansu Yetisgin

Hi again all! To answer the question @Michele DeFilippo raised, I've checked in with our Product team. For this first iteration, the team is focused on request forms that promote structured work intake that reduces back and forth email communication required to collect all required information.

However, they understand that there are other needs for external communications. At the moment, they are researching how to expand this functionality further while being compliant with legal and security requirements. Hope this helps🙋🏻‍♀️

Claudia Tietze

This is excellent news, thank you. I've learned that the editing of the subject will be available within a few weeks - then it's perfect!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you @Claudia Tietze 🙌

Robin Pepper

This is useful and will help us work with our freelancers

Elizaveta Bogdanova

I'm happy to hear that @Robin Pepper 🤗

Laura Walz

This is a nice start! I agree with other comments about the need for this outside of a request form, and a preference to be able to customize the email subject line.

One other future consideration: Allow the name to be mapped to a custom field. We have to ask the requestor's name twice in order to capture for a custom field, then again for the email functionality. Would be great if we only had to ask once.

Lukas Flatz

That make it more easy. Please add that everywhere. It would be nice if I can put the Mailadress in a costumfield and define that as mail receiver.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for your feedback folks, I'll pass it on to the team shortly 👍

Melissa Mourer

Love the idea of being able to email external contacts directly from Wrike! I agree with those who have suggested this be an option across the board, not just for request forms. Also agree with the need to be able to customize the subject line of the email.

Specific to request forms there are two pieces that would be beneficial for our use.
1) This needs to be an option for projects, not just tasks. We do a lot of work with projects and it would be helpful to communicate with our external contacts at the project level, not the task level.
2) For request forms it would be helpful to have the option to include a copy of the form responses in the email. Sometimes there are details from the form that need to be clarified - it would be easier on us and the external contact for all of that information to be in one email instead of them having to go back and see their e-receipt.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you for your detailed feedback @Melissa Mourer!

On enabling this functionality for projects - this is already available for project-based custom item types 🙂

Diana Martin

This is a great new feature and I'm excited to try it. However, I will have to modify my request forms to create tasks instead of projects which is a huge downside to this feature. My team does a significant amount of work via our request forms but having it tied to tasks instead of projects will create problems in our workflow.

Michele DeFilippo

We're very grateful that you're working on this feature. When do you expect to roll out mobile capability? Without this (and the ability to customize the subject line as stated above), I hesitate to roll it out. I can't very well tell clients they can only communicate with us from the desktop.

Cody Rogers

@Diana Martin You can do it through a project by first creating a Custom Item Type for those projects. Takes a little getting used to, but I set those up for a department that deals with outside requests and the slight change in the look of the project pane was worth it to them to be able to communicate with the requestors within Wrike directly.

@Michele DeFilippo if the "client" is the one that is the requestor, they would respond within their email platform, so it doesn't matter if they're mobile or not. If the "client" is the one that uses Wrike, then unfortunately it's not in the mobile app yet; we checked this as well. Thankfully, 99% of our team doesn't use the mobile app.

Michele DeFilippo

Thanks for the clarification, @Cody Rogers.

Samantha Davis

I just want to second @Melissa Mourer 's suggestion bout integrating e-mail communication to projects. Most of our external request forms submit as projects with blueprints, having multiple tasks assigned automatically. As a PM, I usually have to e-mail the requestor outside of Wrike and would love to be able to communicate directly from the project.