Friday, 4:20pm. An email lands at office@ of a furniture company: a cracked worktop from order 4821, with a damage report attached. Three people have access to the address, and each of them can assume someone else will handle it. I'll show you how to turn such an email into a task in Task Manager: a Recipe will recognise the report and create a task for a chosen person.
Mail into task: why does a complaint need a place of its own?
You turn an email into a task so that the matter gets a responsible person and a due date. As long as the complaint exists only in the inbox, someone has to remember to rewrite it and pass it on.
Ola, Kasia and Marek all check the company address on Friday. The mere fact that everyone can read the message doesn't settle who will answer the customer. If this problem sounds familiar, also see how to organise emails on a shared address.
In Task Manager, everyone connects the shared address on their own account. The Mail module treats a connected inbox as private: even an administrator can't see someone else's mail. A task in the Sales Workspace gives the team a place to work on the matter, but it doesn't turn private correspondence into public correspondence.
Three parts of a Recipe are enough to get started
A Recipe in Task Manager consists of WHEN, IF and DO: an event, conditions and actions. In this case, the event is a new email, the condition is the assessment of the report, and the action is creating the task. You don't need to connect separate services.
Open Automations using the views icon, the squares in the top bar. The + button above the list lets you start from a blank Recipe or choose a preset. In the "Customer service" category, you'll find "Complaint → urgent task (AI)": AI recognises a complaint or a reported problem, after which a high-priority task and a notification are created. Before saving, choose a Workspace.
The preset opens as an unsaved draft. This means you can review and adjust it before it starts working. It's only visible if you have AI configured and access to Mail. You'll find a description of the other possibilities on the Automations in Task Manager page.
You can also describe the rule to the AI Assistant instead of building it yourself. Ola could write: "When a complaint arrives at the company inbox, prepare a task in Sales for Kasia Wójcik, with high priority and a due date one day from now." The AI Assistant will put together a ready draft, and a "Go to Automations" card will appear under the reply. The draft is unsaved and switched off - until you click Save, the Recipe won't run. Check the result, especially the person assigned and the due date, and only then decide whether to save it.
Which emails will show up in History?
An email rejected by the filter at the trigger won't show up in History; an email that passes the trigger but is rejected by the condition in IF will appear there along with the reason. The "New email in inbox" trigger reacts to received messages; copies of your own outgoing emails don't trigger it. At the trigger, you can additionally specify an inbox and a sender - both fields can be left blank, in which case the Recipe watches emails from any inbox and from anyone.
If Ola has several connected inboxes, she should specify the company one already at the trigger. That way, when checking complaints, she won't have to dig through events from the rest of her correspondence.
Leave the sender filter blank if complaints might come from different customers. If you set it to the Delta Meble address only, other companies won't even reach the AI condition. This is a good setup for a Recipe handling a single customer, but not for the whole office@ inbox.
The AI condition checks the meaning of an email, but doesn't open the PDF
The "AI will assess (custom condition)" condition sees attachment names, but not their contents. In the IF section, you can combine it with text-based conditions. Conditions are joined with "and", and AI is evaluated last, after the simpler checks. This way you're not querying the model for every email that a more obvious filter has already rejected.
Kasia could enter phrases such as complaint, damage, return, defect in "Mail subject contains". Here, commas mean "any of these words". Enter the stem: complain will find various forms, whereas the full word complaint will not find the word "complaints". Such a filter comes at a price, though. If a customer titles their query "Problem with the worktop", it won't reach AI evaluation. Test real subjects from your own inbox, or drop the subject filter altogether and let AI evaluate more messages.
Describe the condition itself as a plain sentence: "Is this message a complaint or a report of a product defect, rather than a quote request, a newsletter or an invoice?". The model receives the sender, subject, author, a content excerpt and attachment names. It won't read the contents of damage-report-4821.pdf; if the defect is mentioned only in the document, the evaluation may miss it. When in doubt, the condition answers "no".
The mail content excerpt passed for evaluation goes to the AI provider whose key your company uses. Before enabling the rule, check what gets sent to the AI provider. If the evaluation should take into account your company's complaint-handling notes, you can attach it as knowledge. Choose a small source: the limit is around 12,000 characters, and sources that don't fit are skipped entirely.
A task has an owner and a due date, but it won't read them from the e-mail
The Recipe doesn't pick a responsible person or read a due date from the e-mail content. In the EXECUTE section, set the action "Create task": choose the Sales Workspace, Kasia Wójcik and a due date of +1 day. In the subject you can use {{mail.temat}}, and in the description {{mail.tresc}} and {{mail.nadawca}}, so the team has the content of the report without opening Ola's inbox.
For an e-mail from Delta Meble, a task is then created about the damaged worktop. The Recipe links it to the mail thread. A badge with the e-mail subject appears in the task header. In the correspondence menu you'll find a shortcut to the linked task. The badge is a way to reach the thread for someone with access to the inbox, not a way to share the message with everyone in the Workspace.
You can add another action, "Save attachments to folder", so the report ends up in Files. If you also want to send an acknowledgement, use "Send e-mail from your inbox": the reply to the sender goes out from the Recipe author's address and lands in the same thread. First, though, check its content in a test. An automatic acknowledgement shouldn't promise the customer a resolution deadline your company hasn't actually set.
The Recipe won't pick Kasia based on the fault description. You choose her in the action. Nor will it read the deadline requested by the customer: +1 day means a due date counted from when the e-mail arrives, not "the next working day". If a message arrives on a Friday, check whether such a deadline fits how your company works. Split different people or handling paths into separate Recipes with different sender or subject conditions.
"Test" lets you spot a mistake before the first send
The "Test" button takes the most recent events matching the trigger and shows which ones would pass the conditions and what messages would go out, with variables filled in. It doesn't execute or send anything, so use it before saving an enabled Recipe. Once you click "Save", an enabled rule runs immediately.
In the test, look for two kinds of mistakes. Does the e-mail "Damaged worktop" pass the subject filter? Does a plain pricing enquiry fail to pass the AI condition? If the answer surprises you, adjust the conditions and repeat the test before letting automatic replies reach customers.
After launch, click "History". For 30 days you'll see completed runs with a list of steps, skipped ones with the condition that stopped them, and errors with a message. If there's no execution for 48 hours, the Recipe will show information about the last run and the rejected events. After more than a week, with at least 10 events and not a single execution, you'll get a notification.
There are also safeguards: exceeding the hourly run limit pauses the Recipe, and three errors in a row cause an automatic pause with a notification and an e-mail. The daily limit of AI queries from Automations is set by the administrator in Settings → AI; it's 200 by default, and 0 disables the limit. Once it's used up, AI-based Recipes are skipped until midnight, with an entry in History. You can find out more about controlling rules in the Automations resources.
Before you start, you need the Pro plan, an inbox and an AI key
For the Recipe described here you need the Pro plan, a connected inbox and configured AI. Mail and Automations are part of Pro; the "AI evaluates" condition itself requires your own key with OpenAI, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude or xAI Grok. You pay the provider directly for model usage, with no mark-up from Task Manager.
You can add an inbox via Settings → Mail → Add inbox. You'll provide the address and password, IMAP/SMTP server details (i.e. the protocols for receiving and sending mail), and inbox settings. Gmail and Outlook require an app password instead of your regular account password. Finally, use "Test connection", which checks receiving and sending separately.
The Task Manager licence is perpetual: you pay once for the number of seats, and the price includes 12 months of updates. Renewing afterwards is optional. The Pro plan costs PLN 1,990 in the Starter plan for up to 8 people, PLN 3,990 in Classic for up to 20 people, and PLN 5,990 in Max for up to 35 people.
Tomorrow, open the "Complaint → urgent task (AI)" template, select a Workspace and check the responsible person. Then click "Test" and compare the results with recent reports before saving the enabled Recipe. Want to see the program first? Open the Demo.
Frequently asked questions
Will mail into task automatically assign the complaint to the right person?
No, you choose the responsible person yourself in the "Create task" action. If reports should go to different people, prepare separate Recipes with different sender or subject conditions.
Will AI read the damage report attached as a PDF?
No, the "AI will assess" condition sees attachment names, but doesn't look inside them. You can save the file itself in Files using the "Save attachments to folder" action.
Once a mail is linked to a task, will the whole team see the correspondence?
No, linking doesn't give the team access to the mail thread; only people who have that inbox connected on their own account will be able to open it. However, if you paste the subject or body of the email into the task, task participants will see the information placed there. You can save attachments in Files.
What to do when a rule catches too many emails or misses complaints?
Click "History" to see executed and skipped events, along with the condition that stopped each skipped one. Before saving changes, use "Test" on recent events matching the trigger.
Do I need AI to automatically create tasks from emails?
No, you can also create a task from an email using text-based conditions, without an AI assessment. The "AI will assess" condition and the preset marked "(AI)" require AI to be configured; Mail and Automations require the Pro plan.
Sources
The Task Manager Team - we write about teamwork, AI in business and keeping tasks organised, using examples from Task Manager, software installed on your own server. Task Manager has been developed by Blue Creation Group (Piotr Łącz) since 2013 and is used by organisations including Neonet, the Military University of Technology and Polpharma - read customer reviews. We check our articles against the user guide and the latest version of the software.
