#9 Accepting Email Replies
When you send a message to a non Plum Mail user, we package that up into an email. Contained in that email is a magic link which onboards that person into Plum Mail so they can use the cool features and send you a reply.
However, we found that some users replied to the email, out of habit, and those messages were getting lost.
Plum Mail now receives those emails and places them into your conversation in Plum Mail.
This development is the first step in allowing you to handle all your communication in Plum Mail. You will be able to receive any and all incoming email to you email address using Plum Mail.
We will still offer those you write to the opportunity to use Plum Mail via magic link so they can benefit from the collaborative features in your conversations.
More work is needed to enable this, but the first step has now been delivered in order to recieve email replies.
We are developing features that will enable to you triage incoming email incredibly efficiently. Plum Mail will always prioritise being able to focus on the conversations that matter most to you.
Serving Suggestions
You can't (and shouldn't) force people to use something a certain way.
Hence, there is nothing wrong with a little guidance, i.e. a serving suggestion.
So, alongside accepting incoming email (even though it's not quite how we intended for Plum Mail to be used) we have created some unobtrusive guidance:
- When someone replies by email, we will send a friendly note just explaining what Plum Mail is, remind them it's free to access the conversation in progress with you and show them how to find it.
- We will let you know when a reply you receive was sent by email and offer some optional text to include with your next message asking ever so nicely that the person at least try Plum Mail out.
- If a new user does reply in Plum Mail, we will make a special effort to direct them to a page that orientates them and ensures they know we're here to answer any questions they may have.
These kinds of detailed improvements are made possible, with your help so thank you. You have helped us validate Plum Mail and now we have the confidence to invest time and money into tackling tricky edge-cases like processing incoming emails.
Waitlist Update
Work continues in parallel on the action first inbox feature and a UI revamp. We can't wait to invite you to it. The waitlist continues to grow but we will onboard people when your number comes up.
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. :-)
