Mailmanagr.com beta launch

I pushed the beta for mailmanagr.com out the door yesterday, and so far, I’ve have some pretty good results. There was only one UI bug reported, which I’ve already fixed, and one other case where I wasn’t handling error checking well enough (API access was turned off on the account, but instead of dealing with it gracefully, scary error text flowed.

I had planned to spend the morning killing bugs, but there being next to none, I opted to implement vCards instead. So it’s actually really cool (on the Mac at least), you can create a new e-mail address for a project and category, and then hit the vCard icon and it adds it to your address book. For me, this is then synched right up with my iPhone — so the next time I need to add a message on the road, I can just fire off a quick message.

Bug tracking

I decided to do a couple of other interesting things with Mailmanagr too. There was the possibility that I’d get a flood of bug reports come in, and I don’t really have a formal system in place for tracking bugs. Instead of going off and signing up for/installing/building a bug tracker, I opted to build a form that drops bug reports directly into Basecamp.

It’s actually worked out really well! I’m able to post comments on messages, just like I would in a bug tracker database. I can follow up with people directly by e-mail, and then just forward their responses back to Basecamp using Mailmanagr itself!

I’ve been so impressed with the Basecamp API, it almost feels like developing for the Basecamp “platform”.

P.S. If you’re a Basecamp user, and you want to be able to use e-mail as an interface for your projects, just drop me a line. I’d be happy to let you in on the beta.