Since the cat's out of the bag, this service will eventually live at Mailmanagr.com. I've got a temporary site up there now where I plan on blogging development progress etc. Hop on over and subscribe to the feed or via. e-mail if you want to be kept in the loop.
I mentioned briefly over on Flyingtroll that I was going to start playing with the Basecamp API a bit. I did that this afternoon, and built a bit of an e-mail interface for interacting with Basecamp.
It’s pretty basic at the moment, it lets you send messages to “email_td@domain.com” in order to add a to-do assigned to a specific person, or “email_mile@domain.com” in order to add a milestone to a specific person. Also planned are adding messages, and adding files over e-mai, adding general to-dos and general milestones and having it mail you a list of your to-dos and milestones.
First off, if you’re a Basecamp user, is this a good idea? Essentially you’ll set up e-mail addresses for people on each project and be able to interact with things that way.
Second, am I missing something that you would see as essential from the list above? Message categories (I was just going to post everything to a single category)? Multiple to-do lists (I hadn’t thought about how to deal with it yet — if you have a suggestion, feel free to chime in).
Once it’s a little further along, I’ll open it up for some other folks to try: so if you’re interested, leave a comment with your e-mail address and I’ll get back to you.
Update: this post has gotten some link love from the 37signals Product Blog. If you're visiting from there, welcome! I'm still pretty early in development, but I do have a working prototype that I'm currently using for my own projects (handles to-dos, milestones and messages w/ file attachments). If there is something that you're really dying for, please drop me a line or leave a comment, I would love to hear about it.
14 Comments
I think this is a great idea, I’d love to see a highrisey dropbox type feature where i could forward messages to an email address and it would add it as a message…
even better, having a way people could comment on a message notification email via email, but I know thats probably outside the skope of the api… but one can dream
Thanks for commenting Keith. The comment reply may not be impossible. I’m still pretty early in development, so I’ll take some time to explore it.
Since making this post, I’ve managed to get message posting with file attachment handling taken care of. There is stuff in the API for adding comments to messages.
OMG. YES.
I’ve been begging for either the time to figure it out myself, or apparently for my knight in shining armor (you) to take a swing at it. Need someone to help you test? Please let me know what I can do to help. This is genius and you deserve a big payout for it.
–Lisamac
Thanks for the kind words.
I’ve had another couple of requests (via. e-mail) for the comments bit… so I think that’s where I’ll focus my efforts next.
This is a fantastic development and just what basecamp needs. Will it be possible to have project specific drop boxes so that emails sent to a specific project can be added to the message list for that project? Thanks. Am happy to help with testing if you still need support.
“Will it be possible to have project specific drop boxes so that emails sent to a specific project can be added to the message list for that project?”
Yes, that’s the way I’ve got it set up now (kind of like Highrise).
Just in case you missed it at the top, the home for this project will be over at Mailmanagr.com. Feel free to head over there, subscribe to the feed and check out information as it becomes available.
We’d need ability to forward e-mails from our customers into system and make them appear if they were posted by customer. This will help to turn heavy email users into basecamp users. Usually it takes extra 5 minutes to cruft a message citing the e-mail of customer. If simple forward works, replying to e-mail of customer would be
1) forward
2) head to project Overview,
3) locate newest imported message and
4) comment upon it.
Thanks,
m.
Thanks Myroslav,
That should be do-able. Will take some fancy text processing to assign it to the proper Basecamp user account for posting, but not impossible to do.
This sounds great. I would love to test it out. This sounds like a GREAT addition. Thanks for all of your work on it.
Looks like 37 signals going to be handing the comment reply functionality themselves… still loads more to do, but its great that they are finally tackling this issue
http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/03/basecamp-new-fe.html
I read that Keith. That’s really exciting! It’s one of the features that really would be best done by 37signals themselves (I had some ideas on how I could hack together a solution that would work PRETTY WELL but why not have a great solution?)
Kudos to the folks at 37signals for listening to their customers. Based on the feedback I got, and digging through the Basecamp forum, this really was the #1 requested feature. I’m glad that the crew stepped up and took it on themselves.
You’re right about there being a lot more to do though. I’m not at all discouraged I think there’s still a lot of useful functionality that can be added.
I love this feature. Looking forward to seeing it integrated.
We’ll use it all of the time.
I’ve love to be able to forward emails and other messages I recevie outside the project that are related to the rest of the team without having to cut-n-paste them as a message. A Highrise-like unique identifier email dropbox would solve this problem.
Thanks!