I’m surprised at how useful I’m finding the new “create task from e-mail” feature in the upcoming release of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks. This was a frequently requested feature, but not one that I thought I’d use that much myself. Turns out, I was wrong.

I haven’t yet set up any automatic task creation from my various support forms (like I know some of my customers do), but I do use it quite a bit in two situations:

• Although there is a pretty full-featured mobile interface for Tasks Pro™ and Tasks, when I’m on my Treo I’ve found that it’s much faster for me to whip out an e-mail in Snappermail than it is to launch the web browser, wait for the page to load, etc… Perhaps when I have a faster wireless connection to my phone, this will change, but for now the email option is faster. Of course, I’ve got a couple of mailboxes with different default task properties to keep things nice and organized.
• I get e-mail notifications for posts in my forums. Although I have bookmarklets set up to create tasks from web pages, it’s faster for me to simply forward the e-mail with the bug report, request, etc. to one of the mailboxes I’ve set up and have tasks created that way.

It’s always nice to get little surprises like this.