Is there a way to get task offer > acceptance functionality?

Hello,

does Kanboard currently support any way to offer a task to an assignee and allow them to respond in a Kanboard- or admin-defined way (e.g. by clicking accept/reject/other, yes/no/maybe), ideally without having to log in to Kanboard?

Background: At my organization we currently achieve such a workflow with Google calendar. Each job is a calendar event. Project managers send (potential) assignees invitations to job events; the assignee receives the invitation as an email which includes links for “yes/no/maybe” (or some such); the assignment is regarded as confirmed if and only if the assignee clicks yes.

We’re currently considering shifting away from the Google workflow and Kanboard is a strong candidate. But as yet we haven’t figured out how to replace the invite/accept functionality. The calendar plugin doesn’t seem to implement it, so far as we can tell.

To clarify my own question a bit further:
That the response take the form of a pre-defined schema (e.g. yes/no/maybe) is, I now realize, less important than that the response be recorded in the Kanboard record for the task in question. So even a free-form comment (say the assignee was able to respond by writing “I accept” or some other message) would work, as long as it could be
(1) sent from a user who was not logged in, and
(2) received by the system and attached to the task that generated the query to which the user was responding.

Is something like this possible with Kanboard as it now exists? If not, would it take a lot of work to build? (A bounty is something we could definitely think about.)

The ability to send an email to a specific task/card and have it captured as a comment might be one way to implement this. People have been thinking about this at wekan, but don’t seem to have implemented it:
[Add feature: Using API to script Email to board/card, notifications on cards to email, etc · Issue #794 · wekan/wekan · GitHub]

I also wonder if kanboard’s Sendgrid/Postmark/Mailgun integration plugins might have helped here; but they’re no longer maintained.

I used to use Sendgrid a few years ago, and it worked, for the most part. It was a pain to get setup, I remember that.

also used zapier for a bit, it too was kind of a pain in the bottom to setup, but it worked.

aside from that, I think a plugin to simplify the need to just send an email and interact with kanboard would be nice. I’m thinking PhpImap: GitHub - barbushin/php-imap: Manage mailboxes, filter/get/delete emails in PHP (supports IMAP/POP3/NNTP)

I just built a plugin to test it out, and it worked fine, in about 30 mins I was able to connect to an imap server (i just used a google account), check for mail, and get all the info in the mail, from, to, message, subject, even attachment.

probably wouldnt be to hard to build a fully functional plugin that could do a lot with emails using PhpImap. I’ll think about it.

Some screenshots:

Send an email to a task:

Email shows up on the task:

Server setup:

So, currently, how I set it up is, you connect it to a mail server, in this instance I made a google account. If you want to email a task you simply use Task# followed by the tasks number, and then the email address of the mail account. in this instance, Task#1<cree231216@gmail.com>

When you go into the task, and choose Task Email on the sidebar, it checks the mail server and displays the mails that relate to that task.

I didn’t do anything fancy, but it could be very fancy.

1 Like

Thanks a lot for the mock-up. We haven’t made much progress on our discussions over this; I’ll be in touch again if we do.

Hey Craig,
this sounds thrilling, because I am actually looking for a way to do just that(without the need to use external providers like mailgun, sendgrid, etc.)

So I would be more than glad to help with the development of a regular plugin for this functionality (and maybe even more, like also CREATING new tasks from IMAP-Mails)

Would you mind sharing the code that you already have ?

Looking forward to your answer,
Manfred

I’ll open up the repo to the public, next chance I get. it works just fine in its current state, but I stopped working on adding more functionality because GMAIL ends up blocking it after a day or two. I’m sure there is a way to prevent that, but never got around to it.

I’m not sure where I left off, im on my cell phone. I’ll add anyone as a collaborator if they want, just ask.