#2 Organising related conversations

We have continued to welcome new users to Plum Mail. In the last week:

When is a user active?

We always need to ask are we building something someone wants? How do we test this?

One of the best ways to do this is to keep track of the number of active users you have. If people are regularly using your service you must be doing something right.

In many services if someone logs in then they count as an active user. They have deliberately gone to the service to do something.

With Plum Mail very few people click "sign-in". And if they are just replying to a message a friend sent are they really active users? To answer this question we need to frame it in the context: are we building what someone wants?

In our opinion only when a user starts a new conversation and invites someone to it are we helping them better their conversations. Therefore that is the number we are going to track week by week and use it to guide our thinking going forward.

This week we continue to invite people to Plum Mail but have been spending more time finding out what is needed for them to start their own Plum Mail conversations.

Improving email deliverability

Several people reported that when they receive a message on Plum Mail the notification email has been organised into their Gmail "Updates" tab, and not their "Primary" tab. Gmail was also collapsing the link that takes you into a Plum Mail conversation.

To fix these problems we have made several changes to the email we send. First, the link to Plum Mail is now at the top of the message. The other changes are in the meta data we send that should encourage Gmail to put in in the "Primary" tab

If you are using Gmail, please do try sending some more messages and let us know if the changes have worked for you.

Cheers, Peter & Richard

p.s. If you have a friend who you think would be interested in our journey, please do forward this email to them! Thank you. :-)

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