nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Product Enhancement Request: Capture External Customer Email Replies as Wrike Comments

Sambit Behura

Product Enhancement Request: Capture External Customer Email Replies as Wrike Comments

Summary

We would like Wrike to support two-way email communication between Wrike work items and external customers, where a customer's email reply can automatically be captured as a comment on the associated task or project — without requiring the customer to have a paid Wrike license.

Ideally, Wrike could use the task/project ID, unique Wrike email address, URL, or a secure thread identifier embedded in the outbound email to determine which Wrike work item the reply belongs to.

Example

A project manager sends or triggers an email to a customer related to a specific Wrike task/project.
The email contains a secure Wrike task identifier, URL, or reply-to address.
The customer receives the email in Outlook, Gmail, etc.
The customer selects Reply or Reply All from their normal email client.
Wrike recognizes the task/thread identifier.
The customer's response is automatically added to the correct Wrike task/project as a comment.
The customer's identity/email and timestamp are retained with the comment.
The customer does not need to log into Wrike or consume a paid license for this interaction.

Current Business Problem

We collaborate with a very large number of external customers.

Our preferred Wrike access type for these customers is Viewer, because customers primarily need to:

View their projects and assigned work
Review project information
Participate in discussions
Add comments
Receive project updates

Viewer access provides the appropriate level of interaction without requiring us to purchase a paid license for every external customer.

The challenge is that there is currently a disconnect between in-product commenting and email-based commenting.

A customer with Viewer access can comment when working directly inside Wrike. However, in our current workflow, when that same customer receives a Wrike-generated email relating to a project/task and replies from their email client, that reply does not reliably become a Wrike comment.

The result is that part of the project conversation remains in Wrike while another part exists in Outlook/Gmail.

This creates two sources of truth.

Requested Enhancement

We would like Wrike to allow an administrator to enable an option similar to:

“Allow external email replies to be added as comments to this work item.”

When an email is generated from or associated with a Wrike task/project, Wrike should provide a secure identifier in the message or Reply-To address.

For example:

wrike+[TaskID]+[SecureThreadToken]@wrike.com

When the recipient replies, Wrike would use that identifier to associate the email with the correct work item and add the response as a comment.

Importantly, the email interaction should provide comment-only permissions. Replying via email should not allow the external sender to change statuses, dates, assignees, custom fields, or other project information.

Why This Is Important

1. Creates a True Single Source of Truth

Customer communications are critical project records.

Today, if customers respond through email rather than directly inside Wrike, project managers may need to manually:

Copy the email
Find the appropriate Wrike task
Paste the response into a comment
Record who sent it
Potentially upload any relevant attachments

This creates additional administrative work and increases the possibility that important customer decisions or information never make it into Wrike.

Automatically capturing the email response would allow Wrike to maintain the complete project communication history.

2. Improves Customer Experience

Customers should not have to change how they naturally communicate just because our internal project-management platform has changed.

Many external stakeholders naturally work primarily from their email inbox.

Allowing them to simply Reply to an email while Wrike records that interaction behind the scenes creates a much lower-friction experience.

The customer does not need to:

Remember another password
Open another application
Navigate to the project
Find the task
Find the comment section
Re-enter the response they could have simply sent from Outlook or Gmail

Wrike remains the system of record while the customer can communicate through the channel most convenient for them.

3. Increases Wrike Adoption for Internal Teams

When customer conversations remain outside Wrike, internal teams naturally begin falling back to Outlook or Gmail.

This weakens Wrike adoption.

Project managers start asking:

“Should I look in Wrike, Outlook, Teams, or somewhere else to find the customer's response?”

If customer email replies automatically become Wrike comments, employees have a stronger reason to make Wrike their primary project workspace.

The behavior becomes:

Email is simply another communication interface into Wrike — Wrike remains the system of record.

4. Reduces Administrative Work

For organizations managing hundreds or thousands of customers, manually copying customer correspondence into Wrike creates substantial administrative overhead.

Even saving only a few minutes per customer interaction can result in significant productivity improvements at scale.

Project managers can spend more time delivering customer outcomes instead of maintaining duplicate communication records.

5. Improves Auditability and Project History

Customer responses frequently contain:

Decisions
Approvals
Requirements
Schedule discussions
Scope clarification
Risks
Customer commitments
Delivery confirmation

These conversations are valuable parts of the project's historical record.

Capturing them automatically provides a much more complete audit trail and makes future project reviews, escalations, handovers, and customer-success transitions significantly easier.

Why Upgrading Customers to Paid Licenses Is Not an Appropriate Solution

We potentially collaborate with a very large population of customer stakeholders.

Most customers do not require functionality associated with a paid Wrike license.

Their requirements are primarily:

View + Comment + Collaborate

Purchasing paid licenses simply to enable email responses to appear as comments would add significant licensing cost without providing corresponding additional business value.

It could also discourage organizations with large customer populations from using Wrike as their primary customer collaboration environment.

We believe email participation should therefore be treated as an external collaboration capability rather than a licensed project-management capability.

Option 1 – Secure Task-Specific Reply Address

Every work item could have a secure reply address such as:

wrike+[TaskID]+[SecurityToken]@wrike.com

Wrike-generated customer emails would automatically use this address as the Reply-To address.

When a response arrives:

Secure ID → Wrike Task → Add Comment

This would provide very reliable routing without depending solely on the email subject.

Option 2 – Extend External Requester Email Communication

Wrike already supports an email communication model for certain external request-form workflows where external requesters can receive a Wrike email and their reply can return to the associated Wrike task.

We would like to see this concept extended beyond request-form-created work items.

For example, a Wrike user could select:

Email external participant

and provide an external email address.

That recipient would become an authorized email participant for that specific task/thread without becoming a licensed Wrike user.

Their subsequent replies would be captured as comments.

Option 3 – Extend Viewer Comment Rights to Email Replies

Viewer users already have permission to comment on work items shared with them.

Wrike could recognize that an incoming email originated from the email address associated with a Viewer account and treat the email exclusively as a comment action.

The Viewer would still be unable to modify:

Status
Dates
Assignees
Effort
Custom fields
Project configuration

This would align email behavior with the Viewer user's existing in-product commenting permissions.

Option 4 – External Email Participants

Introduce a lightweight concept such as:

External Email Participant

A Wrike user could add one or more email addresses to a task/project without creating Wrike user accounts.

Those addresses could:

Receive selected Wrike communications
Reply to those communications
Have replies captured as comments

They would have no ability to browse the Wrike account unless separately invited.

This could be particularly valuable for Professional Services, Customer Success, agencies, implementation teams, vendors, and other organizations collaborating with large numbers of external stakeholders.

Security / Administrative Controls

We recognize that external email ingestion requires appropriate safeguards.

Administrators could control:

Whether external email replies are enabled
Which Spaces allow external email participation
Which work items allow external email replies
Allowed recipient/sender domains
Whether attachments are accepted
Maximum attachment sizes
How long an email conversation remains active
Whether only original recipients can reply
Whether forwarded messages from unknown senders are rejected
How external participants are displayed in the Activity Stream

A secure token tied to the original task and recipient could prevent someone from simply knowing a task ID and emailing arbitrary information into the workspace.

Comments could clearly show:

External email response from customer@example.com

along with the original timestamp.

Suggested Acceptance Criteria

A successful implementation would ideally support the following:

A Wrike user sends an email associated with a task/project to an external customer.
Wrike embeds a secure work-item/thread identifier.
The customer receives the message in their normal email client.
The customer clicks Reply or Reply All.
No Wrike login is required.
No paid Wrike license is required.
Wrike validates the sender and secure thread identifier.
The response is added to the correct task/project Activity Stream.
The sender's identity/email and timestamp are displayed.
The email reply is treated strictly as a comment and cannot change restricted task/project data.
Administrators can enable or restrict this capability.
Ideally, attachments included with the reply can also be added to the work item subject to administrator settings.

Business Value for Customers

This enhancement would provide customers with:

Less friction
No additional software workflow to learn
The ability to participate directly from email
Better continuity of conversations
Faster responses
Greater visibility into project decisions
A simpler external collaboration experience

Business Value for Wrike Customers / Organizations

Organizations using Wrike would gain:

Increased internal adoption of Wrike
A stronger single source of truth
Reduced administrative work
Fewer lost customer communications
Better project audit trails
More complete customer histories
Improved handoffs between Project Management and Customer Success
Greater scalability when working with hundreds or thousands of external stakeholders

Business Value for Wrike

We believe this would also provide significant value to Wrike.

Wrike already positions itself as a collaborative work-management platform. Making external customer communication easier would further strengthen Wrike as the central location where work and communication come together.

This capability could:

Increase Wrike adoption within Professional Services organizations
Improve suitability for customer-facing project management
Strengthen adoption among agencies and consulting organizations
Reduce reliance on external email systems as separate systems of record
Increase the amount of meaningful project context retained inside Wrike
Differentiate Wrike for organizations with large external stakeholder populations
Remove a potential objection for organizations concerned about external-user licensing costs

Rather than forcing organizations to purchase additional licenses for users who only need lightweight communication capabilities, Wrike could make the core platform more valuable and increase adoption among the users who do require full licenses.