Mail to Roma: forward an email to make a task
Forward any mail to your secret address and it lands on your Tasks list.
Mail to Roma is a private address of your own. Forward any email to it and the mail becomes a task on your Tasks list, with the mail's words as the body and a link back to it. Only mail from your sign-in address, or from a sender you added as trusted, gets in.
Your address
Open Settings → Connections in the browser or in the Mac app and find Mail to Roma, under the API keys. The card shows your address as a pill with Copy address inside it. The address carries 20 random characters, so nobody can guess it, and it is the key: whoever holds it can file onto your Tasks list, which is why it is never public. The iPhone's Settings has no Mail to Roma row.
The card suggests saving the address as a contact named Roma: in Gmail, open contacts.google.com, press Create contact, name it Roma and paste the address as its email. From then on, typing Roma in the To field of any mail fills it in. On a Mac or an iPhone, add the same contact in Contacts.
Forward a mail
Mara gets a quote from a plumber and forwards it to her Roma address. A minute later a task sits on her Tasks list, titled with the mail's subject, with Re and Fwd prefixes off, and wearing the blue dot. Its body opens with the facts in bold: who wrote the mail, who forwarded it, the date, and Open in Gmail when it came through Gmail. Under a rule follow the mail's own words. A mail with formatting keeps its links, lists and headings, and the pictures in it are fetched and stored with the task. A plain-text mail is kept word for word. A very long mail is cut at 40,000 characters with a line saying so. The first line of the task's conversation, posted by Mail, says who forwarded it and whom the original came from.
A mail you write yourself to the address, with no forwarded block in it, is filed whole: its subject as the title, its text as the body. A mail with no subject is titled Mail from, and the sender.
The words stay as the sender wrote them. No cleanup pass runs, no due date is read out of the mail, and no other list is suggested: the task is the mail, on Tasks, for you to date or move as you would any task you create. Attachments are not taken. The conversation's first line counts them, "2 attachments not taken", so you know to fetch them from the mail. No push reaches your phone for a forwarded mail. The task on the list is the whole announcement.
Who may send
Only mail from your sign-in address or a trusted sender becomes a task. Under Trusted senders on the same card, your sign-in email is the first row, fixed. Type another address of yours, a second mailbox or a work address, press Add, and it is trusted from that moment, up to 20 addresses. Remove takes one off with one click and deletes no task. Roma also checks that the mail really came from the address it names, the way mail providers do, so a forged sender does not get in.
A mail from any other address is dropped, and when the mail checks out its sender gets a short mail back: Roma did not create a task, the address is not a trusted sender on this account, and where to add it. Nothing else happens to it. The address takes 100 mails a day, and past that the rest are dropped.
Mail to Roma beside Gmail
Mail to Roma works with any mail app and needs no connection: forwarding is the whole mechanism. Gmail in Roma is the other direction: connect Gmail and the operator reads your threads, drafts replies and turns the mail that needs you into tasks by itself. The two go together. Forward the one mail you want on your list today, and let the Gmail connection read the rest.
Questions people ask
Can someone else add tasks to my list by mailing the address?
No. A mail counts only when it comes from your sign-in address or a sender you added under Trusted senders. Anyone else's mail is dropped, and they get a note saying it did not become a task.
Does the task keep the attachments?
No. Attachments are left on the mail, and the first line of the task's conversation says how many there were. Pictures embedded in the mail itself are kept in the body.
Which list does the task go to?
Always your Tasks list. Move it to another list afterwards like any task, or ask the operator to.
Does the mail get a reply?
No. Nothing is answered and no mail acts for its sender. The one mail Roma sends is the note to a sender whose mail was dropped.