The goal of Mailspect Connect is to completely re-think how email content is presented and shared. Email is a great tool and it was the first killer app of the Internet but it is clearly on its decline and changing rapidly. Younger generations rarely send email and from my own informal observations of my teenagers it seems like email is becoming a tool to communicate with older relatives, teachers, etc. Facebook and other social media are taking over our concept of data presentation and they aren’t shy about sharing. We guard our privacy but in social media we speak out. It is a view of electronic communications that is diametrically opposed to our traditional view of email. This phenomenon is osmotically finding its into business and like it or not, this is how the world is moving. Additionally, business is rapidly embracing cloud applications for utility and core computing tasks and sharing between clouds is essential. As in all of life, too much of a good thing is bad and most of us older people get too much email to process. connect.mailspect.com
The goals of Mailspect Connect is to bridge these changes in electronic communications by sharing email content with cloud applications using web services API’s, sorting email by relevance and sharing sorted email feeds as RSS. We do all this based on your connections. We don’t pretend to have some master algorithm to determine email relevance, you are the master algorithm and our intelligence is built around your connections in the web world.
Mailspect Connect prioritizes email by connections, shares the email data with web connected applications and let’s you view prioritized feeds as RSS data. We do this for any email stream and any client. We don’t need client software that runs on Outlook, we don’t need slow plug-ins, you don’t need to change your email server and you can use any handheld device with our service. You don’t need to bcc strange forwarding addresses or configure email forwarding. We have worked with email for many years, protecting it and archiving it. We know how to deal with email. We know how religious client discussions are and we are completely agnostic. We have a very smart approach to dealing with email, this I can say with absolute certainty.
We started our connection library with Salesforce.com. We figured that there are a lot of Salesforce.com customers, they are all paying for software and won’t take our meager requests for money as religious insults and SFDC is truly pushing the technology envelope of CRM. In our tests of things like Zoho CRM and Sugar CRM they are really toys compared with what Salesforce.com has built, especially in terms of API support and what is available as an app developer. We use Mac’s, there is no email integration with Salesforce.com for Mac clients. It is all about Outlook or email forwarding, neither of which were suitable for us. We set out to prove our concept using Salesforce.com for these reasons – and we have. While we started with Salesforce.com, it is just a start, more will come.
We are agnostic – We import email from anywhere. We do it with IMAP and we can handle email from ANY source whether it be a journal stream, an SMTP feed, PST folders, etc. If it’s email, we work with it. We handle email with no interaction from the end-user.
We prioritize email – We start by finding opportunities or cases with the email contacts. We have more intelligence that we apply as well. If we can match based on this we upload the email to the SFDC opportunity or case. If we can’t do this we let you prioritize it yourself.
We share email data We share the attachments with Salesforce.com or we can put them in Google Docs. In our interface you can quickly navigate between email streams of opportunities and cases and make RSS feeds to read business email with no email client. You can see all business email in milliseconds with Mailspect Connect and you can do this across the organization or workgroup.
So this is a world apart from some Outlook connector. First of all, most of the email done now is not done on Outlook. Even if it’s your office client the data is quite clear that mobile devices are rapidly becoming the primary source of email. Mailspect Connect imports your email, real-time or in batch – and matches it to Salesforce.com. Whether you use an iPhone, Blackberry, Droid or Gmail we have you covered. In the old model of email integration using Outlook you manually match an email based on some choices that the connector presents. You can easily opt out of this attachment and if you don’t have a connector, there is no integration. Certainly the old schoolers amongst us like it like that. We can hide what we want, problems are hidden until they bubble up big and management doesn’t see our private conversations. Problem is that these are all old, broken assumptions. If you work in a big company your email is archived, your boss will see what they want to see when they want to see it. It is their legal right and assuming privacy with corporate email is shortsighted. You aren’t always the source of problems in deals. Problems come from finance, from tech support, from customer service. Few of these people have Salesforce.com connections but their communications are important to deals nonetheless.
So think about it. The world is changing how it communicates. Mailspect Connect bridges the old world of email with the new world of cloud applications and social media. It may take a while for us to tell the world about this but we have built the technology and our ideas are good ones.
Let’s talk!
