I recognize this has been discussed before, including here and here. But both of these posts are nearly a year old, so I'm not sure what the status is on this feature.

Story: Allow project managers to assign work to staff via email

It would be great if a project manager could easily assign work to developers right from their email client. Getting the ticket recorded and in the right person's mailbox are the most important things. Assigning milestones (or other ticket attributes) via email seems much less important.

Here's a fairly simple syntax that might work to accomplish the goal.

Example

To: <Jane Programmer>
CC: <Lighthouse Email for my project>
Subject: URGENT: Broken link!
Body: Go look at this URL (http://...) and fix that link.

Basically, a project manager could email a developer (which they would do anyway), CC the correct lighthouse project, and Lighthouse would correctly assign the newly created task to the programmer, based on the email in the TO line. It already knows about 'Jane Programmer' since Jane is already assigned the project.

Benefits

This syntax has a couple of benefits.

• It will encourage the use of LH for small tasks. Right now, a manager would have to email a ticket, then log into lighthouse to assign it. Which means they probably won't bother with lighthouse.
• Non-technical folks don't need to remember any special syntax (like milestone:v1.0). They can just use email like they would normally.

Anyway, I know for me personally, this style of ticketing (working purely via email) would increase adoption by non-programmers to of tracking systems. Especially in organizations where email serves as the primary tasking mechanism currently.