Take a peek behind the scenes of Email for Trello! Our wrap-up of new features, highlights, changes, improvements and bug fixes for a better Power-Up experience.

We’re always hard at work on improvements to make email in Trello even better. Every change – no matter how small – adds up to improve your experience of the Power-Up and make sure your emails arrive on time, every time. 

The stuff that happens in the background isn’t always obvious, so we’d like to give a special shout-out to these two new changes to how Email for Trello works. 

Improved email thread tracking

Email for Trello now does a better job at tracking replies on the original card or email thread when an email client strips or tampers with the In-Reply-To or References headers. To do this, we embed a ticket reference in email content to help track conversations. This reference can be used as a fallback to detect the original thread in cases where headers are stripped out by mail clients. The outcome is that we should see very few situations where a new or duplicate card is created instead of attaching an email to the original conversation. 🎉

Toggle inline image handling 

We created a new feature that allows users to enable or disable uploading inline images to their Trello cards. When you receive an email with inline images, Email for Trello does its best to determine which images are useful (i.e.: a screenshot) and which images are not (i.e.: a social media icon from a signature) – and uploads them as attachments to the card. However, if you wish to turn this off completely, you can now control image processing for inbound emails. 

Additional improvements 

We made a whole host of minor improvements throughout the last year, including:

Sending and receiving emails 

👩‍💻️ Continuous improvement to reply extraction. One of the great benefits of Email for Trello is that we only show the latest email in the comment – not the entire email thread. We need to constantly update this to work with emails from different clients and apps such as Zendesk, Freshdesk, Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo and Thunderbird.

📧 Bug fix for @reply. Fixed the issue where if you used @reply with an email that doesn’t have a subject, it failed to send.

🙅‍♀️ Ignore auto-replies. We no longer perform reply extraction on auto-generated emails.

📛 Name fixes. We fixed the "null null" name issue when presenting and sending emails without a name. We also fixed the issue of removing apostrophes from contact names on incoming emails.

Security

✅ Improved verification emails. Major improvements to verification emails to prevent emails going to spam. Verification emails are now sent from verify@app.sendboard.com.

🛡️ Fixed security issues. We improved the sanitization of email HTML before rendering on the front end.

🔒 BCC limits. Introduced limits to BCC recipients for all accounts to prevent possible abuse.

Features and usability

🖱️ Drag and drop contacts. New feature that allows you to move contacts between fields when composing or replying to an email. 

📇 Change the card contact with a comment. We added the @assign syntax to allow users to assign a contact to any existing Trello card. If the card is not an Email for Trello card, it will automatically be converted. If the contact doesn’t exist, it will automatically be added. We also allow the use of variables when using @assign to support the syntax “@assign {%Email%}”. Learn more about managing contacts in Email for Trello on the blog.

🔀 Merge tickets issues fixed. 

📋 Allow paste into input. The sender can copy and paste up to 50 contacts into the email input. Supports `,`,` ;` and blank lines as separators.

🪄 Added Trello variables card.id and board.description. Learn more about including variables in your emails and Saved Replies.

✋ Prevent incorrect organisation ids. In the case where an enterprise customer has the wrong organisation id attached to the board from the client-side data that gets sent through. We've made an update to always fetch the board’s organisation id when dealing with a new board.

📬 New ‘Mark Unread’ button. We introduced a new feature that allows you to flag a card notification as unread.

🔕 Manage automated email notifications. You can now opt-out of receiving notifications for email automations that you created.

Text formatting and image handling 

🖼️ Inline image scoring. This release added inline image scoring in preparation to enable inline image detection (excluding signatures).

🔤 Markdown improvements. We made significant fixes for markdown formatting and processing @reply and @email requests. When a Saved Reply is used with @reply or @email, text formatting (bold, italics, etc.) is now retained properly. When converting an email to markdown, we also now properly handle multi-line formatted blocks.

📝 Fixes to Trix editor. Custom fix for Trix editor to correctly deal with paste events where the pasted image references a file that requires authentication. Added new Trix buttons for underline and highlight. 

🌐 HTML bug fix. Fixed bug where hidden HTML content was being rendered to markdown

Stability and reliability

🐘 Improvements to handling large emails. Refactor inbound processing to address issues with large emails. 

🚦 Moved all email processing to a background queue. We now have more control over the retry strategy to process inbound emails, and can suspend a message if it is consuming resources in edge-case scenarios.

🏗️ Infrastructure improvements. We worked hard to ensure that we maintain high availability and security standards.

📈 Performance improvements. We added backend caching for various hotspots that were causing issues.

💬 Fixed multiple comment issue. Fix a bug where our bot could end up creating duplicate comments whenever Trello experiences performance issues.

👯‍♀️ Fixed duplicate buttons. Fixed an issue with duplicate underline and highlight buttons when managing Saved Replies via the reply editor and redundant browser autocomplete widget for to, CC and BCC input field was removed.

Account updates

💳 Prevent payment errors. Small pro-rata fees are now deferred until next renewal, preventing payment errors when changing team size.

🏢 Company name updates. Update the company name in our billing system when the name is updated in account settings.

👷‍♀️ Team management. Always show "Manage team" link in account settings. If you want to increase or decrease your team size, you can do this from the account settings section regardless of plan or status.

Coming soon

We’ve got some exciting updates coming in 2023, so watch this space!