
Show HN: Planleaf – Manage tasks completely over email - ramoq
http://www.planleaf.com
======
TheBiv
Really awesome!

My account managers just said "That's awesome! I'll use the s __* out of that!
"

We're willing to be on the beta of the business version!

If multiple people send me tasks, does it condense my to-do lists into one to-
do list?

bwalker at kouponmedia.com

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ramoq
Thanks!! I'll be emailing you momentarily

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joebo
Can task statuses be updated through e-mail? I don't see anything mentioned
about it. I work on a team where it's typical to respond to the email when
something is done instead of going to the web. There are many different ways
it can be noted so I'm interested in how that would be solved.

This could be the "bookkeeper" of the e-mail chain of tasks and statuses.

~~~
afarra
If by task status you mean complete/uncomplete, yes - just click the checkbox
next to the task or the edit button. If you mean custom statuses like "in
progress", it's possible, but there hasn't been enough demand for it for us to
add that functionality.

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drsim
I found working on the todo list myself very easy, however I wanted to involve
another person in the 'send me a tasklist' list and couldn't.

I tried: \- Add a new task with a @help at the end, CC them in along with the
@planleaf.com email \- Add a new task with a @help@example.com at the end, CC
@planleaf.com

Both didn't work and I received no email from Planleaf to say that it couldn't
be parsed.

Creating a new list, CC tasks@planleaf.com and help@example.com did work.

Is adding a new assignee after the list has been created supported?

That's my criticism with managing tasks through email: input validation and
feedback isn't seamless. In an app UI this is instant. From what I've seen
Planleaf doesn't give me feedback if I type something incorrectly.

As email is much more freeform than a form that's a barrier to being simple
and intuitive. Not an insurmountable one, but I think you need to do a little
more hand holding.

That said, it's a great idea with promising execution and something I've
mulled over building for our marketplace.

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ramoq
Hi drsim, our current version doesn't have support adding people midway
through a list. However, our version in dev does along additional
help/tutorials. This is our MVP of Planleaf

I think we totally need to add more feedback for the user input as best as we
can. We're even toying with adding a web-version of our product for power
users. So web -> email will be very seamless.

Really appreciate the feecback, ping me at omar at planleaf.com if you have
any other suggestions/concerns. I'm all ears :)

~~~
drsim
It looks like a great MVP Omar, I'll be keeping an eye out for updates!

Many of our customers are non-technical so a feedback loop with clear
messaging is essential for us.

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azharkhan
Used this for starting a quick ToDo list between friends over the weekend.

I really like how this allows me to quickly collaborate with people across
different platforms (and devices) without needing them to go through a signup
process.

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mattkopecki
I work in a huge enterprise that will not allow any company data on third
party servers. I also am constantly in need of ways to collaborate with team
members on multiple different projects. But, I can't use any hosted webapps
and have no way to set up my own instance within our company.

If there was an on-premise whitelabel version of this, and my colleagues and I
could create new shared task lists for each project without having to install
anything, that would be amazing.

I recognize that this is just the MVP, but consider this a suggestion for
later if you want to scale this up and add an Enterprise tier.

~~~
ramoq
Hi mattkopecki, our enterprise/business version will be just that. You can
host it internally and have tasks@mybigco.com as your internal hook for tasks

great suggestion, ping me at omar at planleaf dot com if there is anything
else you would like to see in an enterprise tier.

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webmaven
Very nice, I love the seamless use on mobile gmail.

However, does every interaction result in an immediate status update email, or
are they 'chunked' together at all?

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afarra
We debated over this, we want to group multiple together (waiting a bit before
sending the update to see if any others come in), but people love the "instant
feedback" of the update coming right away.

What we plan to do is have the first update come instantly, but then any
subsequent ones would get grouped together. That way you still get the instant
feedback 90% of the time but at the same time you don't get flooded if someone
decides to do a lot of changes in a short time.

~~~
webmaven
Ah. Seems reasonable. You could probably tweak the timing (updates no more
often than every X minutes) and volume (no more than Y changes per update)
dynamically with things like an exponential backoff (to some limit) to
optimize engagement over time.

The ideal knob settings may change depending on whether people are trying to
collaborate synchronously or asynchronously. BTW, are you currently doing
diff-match-patch to account for multiple editors?

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nnnnni
ramoq: I haven't tried it, but what if someone spoofs the from address? For
example, if I used the old telnet to port 25 trick, could I create a task from
billg@microsoft.com to larry@google.com? I have a feeling that since it may be
re-routed through planleaf (is it?) that the destination server may not be
able to validate the from address.

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preek
Looks a lot like [http://task.li/](http://task.li/)

I happen to know the team behind task.li - all extraordinarily competent. They
completely rewrote it a couple of times until the backend as well as the
frontend was not only smart, but also fast and highly reliable for different
inputs and user agents.

Kudos for the competition, too(;

~~~
ramoq
We're familiar with task.li :) I think the two products share some
similarities but are starkly different in their execution. Planleaf has made
an entire task management ecosystem _completely_ inside of email. This is
where we shine, we leverage your email client to facilitate our app.

But yes, competition is always fantastic.

~~~
preek
So you 'check' your tasks inside the mail app?

Does that mean:

* You need a GUI mail client?

* You cannot share the task list with other people? If you can, how do you handle propagating the state of a task (done/undone) to multiple people?

~~~
nnnnni
Oh, that's a good point. I suspect that it won't work with Pine/Mutt or
commandline email handling (vim+mail?). What about clients that don't support
(or have disabled) html email?

EDIT: Added "Mutt" and non-html email question.

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icebraining
From their sample email: _" This is the plain text version of the email.
Please enable HTML to be able to interact with the list"_

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owenmarshall
Pretty cool - I was happy to see it worked with HTML bulleted lists. Most
managers I know don't use plain text emails.

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fit2rule
I'm not entirely sure that the use of the '-' char is a good idea .. isn't
this, or rather the '\--' variation of it, something from SMTP, for use in
separating mail content from the signature? I guess I should test it and find
out .. hope it doesn't try to get my signature done! :)

~~~
afarra
Yes, double dash '\--' is the signature character which is different enough
from '-' to detect. But even if you use '-' as the signature separator, we
have a pretty good signature detection algorithm that would remove it.

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jolt
A great idea. And very well executed! One thing though, for some reason emails
from the same list does not group together in my Outlook 2013, like "RE:" and
"FW:" mails do. (In other words: The "Show as Conversations"-option doesn't
seem to work on emails from Planleaf)

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sophsterq
Love the idea and execution :)

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cheshire137
The idea of it sounds horrible to me. I want less email, not more. Getting a
daily digest and managing to-dos via email in general doesn't appeal to me.

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CrimeM4sterGOGO
Clever how you do task management using email rather than an app or chrome
extension. Any reason why you chose email over the other approaches?

~~~
ramoq
Thanks! We wanted to remove all barriers of collaboration. It's friction-less
using Planleaf, you need nothing other then an email to get going :)

~~~
thenipper
I really like this. I work for an NGO that does work all over the world and I
can see something like this being really useful for areas that have bandwidth
concerns!

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thekonqueror
Nice idea!

On backend, how do you authenticate the email sender? Would someone be able to
flood a task list by spoofing an email ID?

~~~
afarra
We check email headers and have a few other factors to determine if the sender
is genuine or spoofed. You would be able to create a new task list with a
spoofed address, but you can't spoof your address to add to someone else's
list.

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x3ro
Am I the only one getting "Server not found"? :(

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ramoq
everything looks good on our end. Try again

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x3ro
So weird... `dig` properly resolves planleaf.com to an IP, I can ping that IP
but both Fx and Chrome say "Server not found" ... :D

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oakaz
Integration with IDoneThis would be awesome.

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bronson
Can't find pricing...? Am I blind?

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ramoq
You're not blind, lol. We're launching a business tier next which we'll charge
for :)

~~~
dhrp
+1 for having a business model. Too often I see great tools disappear because
they got acquired, ran out of funding or something. I'd love to see this be an
example of a tool that makes enough money to sustain it's team.

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holri
the task email froze my claws-mail in html view. js and pictures are disabled
for html view.

~~~
ramoq
Let me take a look into that for you. TBH, never heard of claws-mail until now
:p

~~~
holri
thank you, claws is an excellent email client

