I wanted to share something we at Good Enough (https://goodenough.us) built over the past year:
Jelly! https://letsjelly.com
Jelly is a simpler shared inbox for small teams (like us) to answer team email. We had just been sharing a login to Fastmail previously, but as email started getting busier, that really started to stink as a solution — no one knew who was going to answer what, if someone else saw an email or not, etc etc. And a Google Group would prove to be worse, as replies too easily got lost to personal inboxes if someone accidentally didn’t “Reply All”. It wasn’t great!
We went looking for a tool to solve these problems, but everything we found was way too much software, and really quite expensive charging per seat. We didn’t need a complex ticketing system. We just needed email, as a team, in a simple and sane way.
So we built Jelly! And we’re not charging per seat, so you can bring your whole team for a very affordable price. (As a quick comparison for our team of six: Jelly’s lowest tier costs just $29/month while Zendesk’s costs upwards of $330/month.)
We would love to hear thoughts from anyone on a small team that needs to handle shared email. Also, if you know of other teams in that same position, we’d appreciate you letting them know about Jelly. Thank you!
But once the messages end up in your personal inbox, it's pretty hard for the other people you are collaborating with (or your family in the scenario here) to participate in the rest of conversation, unless you're willing to be extremely diligent with Cc/Bcc-ing.
It's also certainly possible to use things like labels or messages-left-in-draft to try and avoid stepping on each other's toes and coordinate responses. But again, you've got to be diligent.
What Jelly aims to do is make it _easy_ for non-technical people (and technical people who want something that "just works") to share email smoothly, without having to build the rules themselves or make sure everyone sticks to the system to keep it working well.
It seems like fundamentally the same problem as this tool is solving, but when it's for family instead of business, even $30/month starts to feel pretty pricey.
- My wife and I each have our own email addresses
- We have a third email address that we share with the school (etc.); this email address is not a real inbox but a forwarding address that sends mail to the first two
- When email is sent TO this address, the default is to reply FROM the address
- When email is sent FROM this address, an Auto BCC rule sends a copy to the other spouse
In this way we both get our own personal email addresses, but we have a shared address that goes to both of us, and we know if an email sent to that address has been replied to, what the reply was, etc.
Paid service - but with all the features + privacy of not being on Google (Well, anything going to my gmail still goes through - but slowly moving away) + they have excellent and fast customer support - all makes it worth it.
I don’t really get where to configure the auto bcc rule when sending emails from third email address.
Thanks
I tried sparkmail but it's a little much for non-business purposes to be honest.
So, what usually happens: 1. Both of us get email
2. One of us sees email before other, may or may not do something about it
3. Possibly one of us fwds the email to the other, creating two copies in one inbox.
4. It's not always clear if (2) results in something happening. And by that I don't mean in (2) that one of us said we would do it. Instead, I'm thinking one step further: we needed to pick a Parent-Teacher conference. How do we know we did it?
5. At some point we might archive/delete emails
6. Many of these emails contain admin dates. Things like half-days, dismissal changes, etc. Usually with dates/times that then need to go into a calendar. So, we try to send each other calendar invites (from personal Gmails) to handle.
#6 is often the real problem. We're looking into the Skylight Calender. Some people swear by it. I hear people like Cozi but that app is a mess.
We use Migadu, which allows you to have as many mailboxes as you want with any plan, so it’s pretty cheap.
I wrote about my setup here: https://www.commithash.com/posts/a-better-way-to-share-email...
I think I can do something like $25 or $50 a year for an email address that's basically a distribution group w/ some smart routing for replies and something similar for sms.
Use cases as varied as shared accounts, everyone getting grocery delivery notifications, etc.
I too have thought of a shared comms channel for all "incoming family business" SMS & Email would be a good start, but WhatsApp is a non-negligible channel as well.
And dont get any parent started on the 35 different School/Club apps etc
i just have 1 mail@domain.ext email id that i use everywhere. everyone is logged in to that email
i use backblaze b2 for backups which are taken automatically. this costs me something stupid, like $15/year for vps and $12/year for domain if i remember correctly.
have to occasionally update the server by ssh which takes 5 minutes every 6-10 months.
I've been burned too many times on "simple, cheap, multi-user" shared inboxes. Most recently Groove HQ where it went from $20 for our team of 3 to $45/seat for our team of 5 over the course of a few years. It was still worth it, but when I left that company, I had to switch to a shared gmail account because I'm not dropping $135/mo for a software project that may or may not take off.
We’re specifically building this _not_ to hoover up every dollar on the table, but to serve smaller groups that have been left out in the cold by "bigger" tools, and who get screwed by per-seat pricing. We believe there are enough teams who fit this profile to be profitable.
There’s a difference between making profit and maximizing profit. the capitalists will call us crazy, but we're not here to maximize profit.
I have teams with 1-2 permanent members and 8 more that may or may not want to check like... maybe once a week at most. Seat limits really mess with the "compliance officer needs to do something every once in a while but do we really need to pay for a separate seat?" issue with per-seat pricing.
A heavy user and a one-time-monthly user are different costs to the product but charge me the same. ;_;
Annecdotally, I think there's a lot of good problems for a new vendor to solve with a product in this category, but a collaborative inbox is really just the baseline of a solution. Personally, the main issue my team has with collaborative inboxes are not issues with handling who replys to each message, it's an issue of spam. Would love to have a vendor build a solution powerful enough to solve these specific problems:
(would be happy to chat more, if you want to interview a potential customer; if you could really solve these above problems I'd pay you way more than your highest monthly rate on your pricing tier in a heartbeat, ideally scaling per email inbox rather than seat which would be likely be more lucrative for you, and more predictable for me)Beyond that, Jelly has better design (IMHO!), can be used without needing a Google account, lets you discuss conversations inline, gives you an activity view for quickly seeing everything that's happened... basically, GGCI is fine, but we are laser-focussed on making Jelly a _great_ shared inbox for teams.
We'd love to chat more about your ideas though -- send us an email! You can find the contact details on https://letsjelly.com ;-)
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Good stuff. I'm going to send this around to some people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7869726
https://web.archive.org/web/20141013115541/https://frontapp....
I'm concerned about email deliverability--Even more so after the email verification ended up in my spam. Handling incoming email is simple enough, but for this to be useful to my team we would want to be confident that the emails are ending up in the right place.
Constructive criticism, might just be me: I would lose the phrase "jam on email"... something about it (too folksy?) rubbed me the wrong way.
Perhaps something simpler like "Say hello to Jelly, team email done right."