Outlook to Trello: 4 Ways to Turn Outlook Emails into Cards

If you search "Trello for Outlook" hoping to find the add-in, I have bad news first: Atlassian retired the official Trello add-in for Outlook on December 15, 2022, and pulled it from the store. It's gone. What's left is a set of workarounds, and some of them are better than the add-in ever was.

I build Quicktion, which is one of those options, so read the recommendations with that in mind. But the comparison below is the one I'd want if I were an Outlook user trying to get emails onto a Trello board today: what each method actually does with the subject, body and attachments, what it costs, and where it falls over.

Four ways to connect Outlook and Trello:

1. Outlook forwarding rule + Quicktion (automatic, formatted cards)
2. Trello's built-in email-to-board address (free, basic)
3. Microsoft Power Automate (Standard connector, you build the flow)
4. Zapier or Make (general automation, polling)

There is no Quicktion add-in for Outlook. Quicktion has a Gmail add-on; on Outlook it works through forwarding, which is method 1.

Method 1: Outlook rules + Quicktion forwarding

This is the "set it once and forget it" option. You connect Trello to Quicktion, pick a board and a list, and Quicktion gives you a private address like xyz@in.quicktion.io. Then you tell Outlook to forward certain emails there.

How it works

Every email that hits the address becomes a Trello card:

• Subject becomes the card name
• Body is converted from HTML to markdown and becomes the description, with links kept clickable
• Attachments are uploaded to the card
• Default labels and members you set on the destination are applied to every card
• Sender name, sender email and date can be added to the description as a footer

You can create as many destinations as you want on Pro, each pointing at a different board or list. Client emails go to the "Requests" list on the client board, bug reports go to "Triage" on the engineering board, invoices go to a finance board. One Outlook rule per destination.

Setting it up in Outlook

The short version: in Outlook on the web, Settings > Mail > Rules > Add new rule, add your conditions (from a domain, subject contains, sent to a shared mailbox) and set the action to forward to your Quicktion address. Rules created here or in Exchange Online run on the server, so they work with Outlook closed, on your phone, or from a shared mailbox.

Desktop-only rules run when that Outlook is open. If forwarding stops on the weekend, that's usually why.

The full walkthrough with screenshots-in-words for desktop, web and shared mailboxes lives in How to Save Outlook Emails to Trello. I won't repeat it here.

What you don't get

No per-email editing before the card is created. The Gmail add-on has a preview where you can tweak the card first; Outlook users get whatever the destination's mapping says. In practice this is fine for rule-based flows (the whole point is that you don't touch each email) and annoying if you wanted to cherry-pick.

The other honest limitation: some organizations block external forwarding at the Exchange level. If your rule saves but nothing arrives, ask IT whether outbound auto-forwarding is allowed for your mailbox.

When to use it

When you have a class of emails that should always become cards and you want them to look right without opening Trello. Shared inboxes are the sweet spot: support@ or sales@ forwarding to a board that the whole team works from.

Method 2: Trello email-to-board

Trello has had this for years and it's still the fastest way to try the idea. Open the board menu, click Email-to-board, and Trello gives you a personal address for that board.

How it works

Forward an Outlook email to the address. Per Trello's docs, the subject becomes the card title, the body becomes the description, and attachments are added to the card. You choose which list new cards land in.

You can also add labels by putting #labelname in the subject and add members with their @username. That's more control than most people realize the feature has.

Limitations

The address is per board and per member, and it acts as you. If you share it, whoever has it creates cards under your name.

Formatting is the real problem. The description is the email body more or less as-is, which for a typical HTML email from Outlook means a mess of stripped tags, signature blocks and quoted history. Sender and date are not pulled into any structured place. There's a 10 MB cap on the whole email including attachments, which invoices with scanned PDFs hit more often than you'd expect.

And the #label and @member tricks only help if you're forwarding by hand. An Outlook rule can't rewrite the subject to add a hashtag, so automated cards all arrive unlabeled unless you set up one address per board and accept the default list.

When to use it

Low volume, casual, and free. If you forward two emails a week to a personal board and don't care what the description looks like, this is enough. The moment you want clean descriptions, automatic labels, or different lists for different senders, you've outgrown it.

Method 3: Power Automate

Power Automate is Microsoft's automation platform, and for a lot of Microsoft 365 shops it's the default answer to "connect Outlook to anything." For Trello specifically it's more viable than for some other tools, because the Trello connector is a Standard tier connector. That means it works with a regular Microsoft 365 license, no Power Automate Premium add-on required. (I checked Microsoft's connector reference before writing that, because the Airtable connector is Premium and people assume they're all the same.)

How it works

Trigger: "When a new email arrives (V3)" from the Office 365 Outlook connector, filtered by folder, sender or subject. Action: "Create a card" from the Trello connector, which takes a board ID, a list ID, a card name, a description, and optional label IDs, member IDs and a due date.

That's the two-step version. The version people actually ship has a few more:

• The Outlook trigger gives you the body as HTML, so you add an "Html to text" step or accept tags in the description
• Attachments arrive as base64 content, so you loop over them and either save to OneDrive/SharePoint and link, or push them to the card separately
• Label and member IDs are IDs, so you look them up once and hard-code them
• The Trello connector allows 100 API calls per connection per 10 seconds, which is fine for email volume

Where it wins

You already live in Power Automate, you want the email to also ping a Teams channel or create a Planner task, or your IT team wants every automation inside the tenant with its audit logs. Power Automate does all of that on the same canvas.

Where it loses

Time. What Quicktion does with a rule and a destination takes an afternoon in the flow editor, and the flow references list IDs and label IDs that silently break when someone reorganizes the board. Description formatting is on you. And there's no equivalent of a per-destination default that a non-technical teammate can change without opening the flow.

Method 4: Zapier or Make

Both have an Outlook (Microsoft 365) trigger and a Trello "Create Card" action. Zapier's Microsoft Outlook trigger polls for new email rather than receiving it instantly, so cards show up on a delay that depends on your plan (up to 15 minutes on lower tiers). Make's Microsoft 365 Email module works the same way with its own scheduling.

What you get

A card with the fields you map: subject, sender and body are available from the Outlook trigger and you assign them to the card name and description. Attachments need extra steps and often an extra task. Labels and members can be set per Zap.

Where it fits

When the email is one input to a longer workflow. "Outlook email arrives, create Trello card, post to Slack, add a row to a sheet, wait two days, follow up" is a Zapier job. If the whole workflow is "email becomes card," you're paying $19.99+/month for the multi-step engine and using one step of it. I wrote more on that trade-off in Zapier Email to Trello Alternative.

Outlook to Trello: method comparison

Which one should you pick

If you want to test the concept today, forward one email to Trello's email-to-board address. It's free and takes a minute. You'll see immediately whether the description formatting bothers you.

If it does, or you want rules that route different senders to different lists with labels applied, use an Outlook rule with Quicktion. It's the same forwarding motion, with a destination that knows your board and cleans up the body. The free plan covers 25 emails a month, which is enough to run a real rule for a while.

If your company already runs Power Automate flows and IT wants everything in the tenant, build the flow. The Trello connector being Standard tier removes the licensing objection; the maintenance is what you're signing up for.

If the email is one step in a bigger cross-app process, Zapier or Make.

I'd only avoid one thing: waiting for the Trello for Outlook add-in to come back. It's been gone since 2022. If you specifically want a button inside Outlook, the third-party "Send to Trello" add-in on AppSource is the closest thing left, and I haven't used it enough to vouch for it either way.

Get started

Sign up for Quicktion, connect Trello, pick a board and list, and copy the forwarding address. Then create the Outlook rule following How to Save Outlook Emails to Trello. Forward one test email, check the card, then turn the rule loose.

Related guides

• How to Save Outlook Emails to Trello, the step-by-step for desktop, web and shared mailboxes
• Outlook to Trello, product overview
• Gmail to Trello: The Complete Integration Guide, if part of your team is on Gmail
• How to Save Emails as Trello Cards, more on card structure and email-to-board
• Zapier Email to Trello Alternative, the automation-platform trade-off in more detail