Mailmanagr

Private items

At long last, we’ve released the ability to post private messages and create private todos. (Hey, it took Apple 3 versions of the iPhone OS to do copy and paste!)

If you’d like to post a new message through Mailmanagr and have it marked private, just put ppp before your subject line.

This trick works for messages, and for new todo lists.  Enjoy!

Updates!

A couple of notes on new developments:

1. After waiting entirely too long for one company to get their act together on payment processing, we just decided to ditch them and go elsewhere. Within 24 hours, the paid plan was live. All current subscribers received an e-mail outlining the differences between paid and free, and we’re extending a 30 day window to folks before all of the free restrictions kick in.
2. We put out an update tonight for our OpenID authentication. We were using some old code that didn’t fully support OpenID 2.0, so Yahoo users (among others) were being left out. That’s been fixed now, and a wider range of OpenID providers is now supported. If you run into any trouble, please let us know ASAP.

The future of Mailmanagr is looking pretty good. We’ve had a fairly positive response to our paid plans, and we’re nearing the break-even point on things. Regardless, now that we’re done treading water with payment processors, it’s full speed ahead on those new features we’ve been talking about.

Payment updates!

We’re about a day away now! Once everything is finalized, we’ll give you the complete rundown on what happened with payment processing, in hopes that you can learn from our mistakes.

Another neat tidbit (for you) is that after re-running the numbers, we’re actually going to offer the paid plan at $7 US per month, instead of $9. We were bouncing back and forth between the two numbers for some time, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t make that much of a difference to us. Our goal with Mailmanagr isn’t to make a boatload of money, it’s to offer something really useful to our users and to have it pay for itself.

Paid plans & free plans

Some folks may have noticed that Mailmanagr is now offering a paid option.  Well, sort of.  Mailmanagr is trying to offer a paid option, but we’re still waiting on final setup from our payment processor.  Here’s the low-down:

Mailmanagr will now be available in two flavours: a free option, and a paid option.  The free plan will allow you to send all the messages you want for up to 20 addresses that you specify.  You can send as many messages as you want, and allow as many people to send as you want (no limits there).  The only other limit on the free plan is that file attachments will be stripped out as well.

Please note that for the time being, until we can get our payment processing up and running, there’s no restriction on file attachments — that’s still open to everybody.  We’ll be sending out an e-mail message to all subscribers once everything is sorted out to explain the changes.  We have put in the 20 address limit though.  If that’s affecting you, please get in touch, and we’ll be happy to give you a free 30 day paid account.

The paid plan has no restrictions.  Set up a gagillion addresses and send attachments until your heart’s content.  It’ll run you $7 US per month.

We love Mailmangr, and use it extensively ourselves.  That said, it does cost money to host it and to run it.  We’ve had lots of positive feedback from people during our start up stages telling us that we should be charging for Mailmanagr (hey, ask and ye shall receive!)  Making the decision to restrict file attachment handling was a tough one; but the reality of it is that attachments are what “strain” the system the most.  They use the most bandwidth (and it’s two times the size of each file processed as they need to be downloaded from e-mail and then uploaded to Basecamp).

HTML formatting

We just rolled out HTML formatting support to messages, and comments on todo items.  Now, when you get a message with text in bold, italic, or embedded lists or tables, that formatting will be preserved in the messages posted to Basecamp (we used to only post plain text).

We’re not supporting all HTML formatting at this point.  The big reason is that it was a lot of work to build something to clean up the HTML that is sent by Microsoft e-mail clients.  We’ll likely be adding in additional support in the future as things go along.

If you notice a bug, or would like your favorite HTML tag supported, drop us a line.

Mailmanagr blog

Twitter just isn’t cutting it for an explanation of the new features that we’re rolling out.  Consider this to be Mailmanagr’s official product blog, with new stuff cross-posted to our twitter account.

If you’re new to Mailmanagr, welcome!  If you’d just like to know more, then please read on.  We’re hoping to feature a range of different articles here to help you get up and running with Mailmanagr quickly and to help you make the most of your account (Free or Paid).

Todos with comments

When Mailmanagr first launched, todo lists in Basecamp were pretty basic.  You could create todos, assign them to someone and re-order them in lists.  We supported being able to create them and assign them to people right off the bat.

37signals has since introduced, what we think, is a really great enhancement to todos: you can now comment on them.  This new feature was just itching for support in Mailmanagr, and here’s why:

We get a lot of requests from clients over e-mail.  Some clients just don’t like to use a web-based product; they’re more comfortable getting in touch with you directly.  This was one of the major pain points we felt when we created Mailmanagr for ourselves.  Pre-todo comments, we could forward requests from clients as messages, and then add in a todo.  That just didn’t feel right though, when a client asks you to do something it should be a todo, not a message.

Now, when a client sends in a request, we just forward it along to Basecamp.  The subject of the message becomes the todo, and the body of the message is added as a comment.  Any attached files are included as well.  You can still assign the message and the person making the request has their contact info included as well.  Makes keeping track of things pretty easy, and has managed to get me to Inbox zero for the first time in a long time.

Wildcard domains

It turns out that you don’t always know who exactly will be sending you messages.  Go figure.

One of the most requested features we get is the ability to add in an entire domain to the allowed senders list.  People want to be able to add everyone from example.com, not just person1@example.com, person2@example.com, person3@example.com.

We’re happy to announce that you can go right ahead and do this now.  If you would like to allow all of your esteemed colleagues at Example Corp. to send messages to your Basecamp account through your Mailmanagr account add in “example.com” to your allowed senders list.  No need for *s, or other funky wild card characters.

We’re still kicking around the idea of giving the option to completely open up sending (allow everyone).  Then you could use Mailmanagr/Basecamp for handling new sales leads, help desk tickets, bug reports for public products.  What do you all think?

New design and file attachments

We’ve moved to rock-solid new hosting at Slicehost and launched a new design.  We’ve adjusted a couple of settings to add further stability.  For example:

We’ve put in an attachment limit of 25 MB at the server for file attachments (that means that if you send a message with a larger than 25 MB attachment, the message will get bounced back to you).  Basecamp will handle 100 MB file uploads through the web interface, but e-mail is a little tricky.

Where did 25MB come from?  A little art and a little science.  We tested a few things out, and looked at where performance was hitting a bottleneck, not only with Mailmanagr but also with e-mail in general.  Have you ever tried e-mailing someone a 100 MB file?  It’s not a pleasant experience.

Is 25 MB a hard limit?  Yes in the sense that it’ll bounce if it’s bigger, but no in the sense that we’re open to discussion.  50 MB is probably the absolute limit of what we’d try, and if you find a need for that, be sure to hit us up.

OpenID support

37signals supports OpenID, now we do too.  If you’d rather use OpenID for your Mailmanagr account, rather than a username and password, you now have the option.  We’ve tested this out with quite a few publicly available providers, but if you run into trouble with your OpenID, please get in touch.