I’ve written about the return of the client-server model over on the SproutCore blog. When the web started to get big, the Great Enemy was the client-server model. This was the model that dominated in 80’s when every software vendor your purchased from required you to install some special software (the client) to talk to their server.

In many ways, client-server computing was superior to the central-server approach of the web. Software running on your PC is faster, often more friendly, and easier to use. Despite these strengths, the web has largely won out over the last decade because client-server models required you to download and install software while web-sites do not. Only a few client-server apps still make it today, such as Skype.

That is all about to change however. Client-server is poised to make a comeback, surprisingly, perhaps, because of advancements on the web itself. The truth is, web browsers are now powerful enough that we can realistically write entire applications in JavaScript and run them there. This means we can create true “thick” clients with the rich, speedy interfaces of the desktop, but in the browser where they can be run without having to install them first.

Mailroom is alive again!

You may experience some periodic slowness over the next few hours as we are adding all of the day’s email and finishing testing.

The heart of Mailroom is now running on the new duel quad-core processors (we call it the Ocho) with double the RAM. This will help tremendously during hours of heavy usage and big searches.

Thank you again for bearing with us as we work to create a better Mailroom everyday.

As always don’t hesitate to send any questions or comments. We love to hear from you!

Your Friends at Sproutit

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Mailroom with be offline Sunday April 13th for upgrades to the servers.

There have been a number issues you all have been writing in about and we want you to know we are listening!

We have already tracked down several things that have cause Mailroom to become a little unstable during the middle of day and we are still on the case. The next step is beefing up the servers which will happen this Sunday during most of the day.

Mailroom will still pool all of the email and deliver it to your accounts as soon as we come back up Sunday night.

Thank for your understanding and we hope you enjoy the increased performance after this weekend.

Your Friends at Sproutit

Starting today, Mailroom is available with PayPal support.

Nope, I am not talking about us accepting credit cards via PayPal. What I am talking about is the ability for Mailroom to provide you with a summary of your user’s PayPal transactions with you, while you are answering their support email questions.

This is very useful for anyone who currently does use, or is thinking of using, PayPal to process their credit cards on their site. Since this is more geared towards business use, we have designated it to be available on our $19 plans and up. So, if you have a Basic, Plus, Premium, or Enterprise plan, you know have PayPal support built right in.

Now, to get it to work, you will need to login to your PayPal account and change some settings, but it shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to do it. You can see what needs to be done here – http://sproutit.com/support/paypal This is a set of step by step instructions on how to set it up.

So, what is in this summary? You are going to be able to see how many times someone has purchased from you in the last year, and what the total of all of their purchases amount to. This should help you know if your support email needs to just answer a quick first time purchase question, or might include some ‘upsell’ ideas as well.

So, go ahead and give it a try. The way we see it, the more you know your customers, the better.

Vote to make Mailroom one of the top 100 web apps of 2008! How? Click here to vote

Wednesday morning I awoke to an email from the editor of Webware.com congratulating us to being selected as a finalist for this year’s 2008 Webware 100.

Over 4,600 Web 2.0 services were nominated by Webware readers over the last couple of months and Sproutit Mailroom was selected as one of 300 finalists.

While we are going against some big names in the ‘Communications’ category, I think that you’ll agree that Mailroom is one of a kind one that list. Voting starts today at noon, and will continue until March 31.

So go ahead! Vote for Mailroom and tell everyone you know. In fact, send them this link – http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2008/vote_comm.html?compid=103374 so that they can help put Mailroom into the top 100 web apps of 2008!

Just a week after Super Tuesday, our country still seems to be undecided as to who will compete in the fall for POTUS (President Of The United States). Seems this country is very focused right now on that single election. But, what about all of the other positions that will be up for re-election? Most people think, “there can’t be that many seats opening up this year….” Try this one on for size. It is from Vote-USA.org.

For the 2006 General Elections there were slightly over 13,000 candidates competing for 7,724 U.S. Senate, U.S. House, State Senates, State Houses, and other State-wide offices.

Nearly 8,000 seats that were up for re-election. Many of them that will have a far greater impact on our daily lives. Take the numerous city council, school board, and state assembly positions that there are in your state alone. These are the people that can fix your children’s school, your roads that you drive to work on, or create that public transit service that your city needs.

Email has become used more and more for these most recent campaigns, but it seems that they are focus on just sending you emails that tell you what a candidate wants you to hear. That’s politics. And many of the candidate websites will have a place to enter your email address to ‘join the list.’ But, what happens if those candidates never speak to your concerns? Will they ever respond to you?

Over the next few weeks and months, I will be bringing facts to the table as to why email is going to be the number one way to increase participation in our elections and the people’s way of getting their candidate into office.

How about you take a stab at this question and answer int he comments. I will tell the answer next time.

How many emails does a state assemblymember receive during their campaign?

Does this mean you are taking credit cards via PayPal? NO IT DOES NOT.

For years, enterprise systems have been able to provide integrated support that ties into their billing and sales system, allowing their support staff to know what their customers had purchased before they respond to their customer emails. But, the price tag was huge! We thought, “Why not bring it to life with the number one credit card payment processing system in the world?” Thus, the idea of bringing PayPal support tied into Mailroom was born.

In a few days, Mailroom will be the first, web-based email help desk that integrates PayPal support.

How useful is this? When a customer sends you an email, Mailroom is able to reference your customer’s order history and show of summary of how many transactions, how long they have been a customer, and how much they have purchased from you.

For example:

Imagine that you sell running shoes online, and one of your customers emails you and asks about your shoe return policy. When the PayPal summary shows you that this customer purchased a new pair of sneakers about 6 months ago at about $50. As any good show pro knows, running shoes should be replaced every 6 months or 500 miles to keep your legs healthy. As you answer their question about your return policy, you also remind them about the 6 month, 500 mile idea, and that easily segues into your current promotions for 10% off for the month of March. You’ve just turned your support response into an upsell.

So, if you are looking forward to providing yet another level of support to your customers, get ready…. It will be released before you know it.

From time to time I get a chance to actually meet in person, some of our clients. When that happens I am very eager to hear what they have to say about Sproutit, Mailroom and how they tackle the inevitable job of support. So, I sat down for a bit of fish ‘n chips with Ryan MacCarthy, co-founder of Uloop, and picked his brain.

What is Uloop?

Uloop is an online classifieds platform for colleges.

Classifieds? But, what makes you different than every city’s newspaper online classifieds?

We have created a college specific classified site that thousands of students are using to sell textbooks, find roommates, events, housing, full-time and part-time jobs, internships and even rides home. Take textbooks, for example. Not too many people using the local Herald, or Times will be needing the same biology text book.

So, what are the audiences and customers that you deal with

99% of our support comes from students. It is a mixture of feedback, suggestions, comments, and problems. We also work with employers to provide college specific job postings and housing management to provide housing listings for students.

Do the responses that you provide take on a certain tone and feel?

Absolutely. We make it a point to respond to every single email that we get. We try to be very straight up with students and respond with a casual, and youthful tone. Many of the ideas we build in, come straight from the student feedback. But, if we don’t think an idea is beneficial to more than one person, we’ll let them know what we think.

What do you think is the best feature of Mailroom? Why?

By far it is the multiple user support. This way, we don’t have to have a specific support person, but we can share the load. And, this also closes the gap between the students making requests and the team that creates new features. Less is lost in the middle and keeps our whole team more connected with our users.

Got a favorite company for support?

I like Apple. It fits they way I live.

I tend to work in a mixed software environment of old reliables, and the latest and greatest. The same applies to my web browsers. But, usually I find myself sticking to the tried and tested versions of browsers because so much of my work is done online. I can’t afford to have hiccups.

But, today we received a bug report from a client regarding Firefox 3 beta 2 (latest and greatest…not for the faint of heart). Well, to sum it up, there were some changes made to Firefox 3 that threw off Mailroom. But, without fail, Charles was able to spot the change in no time and applied a fix, and voila! Mailroom is compatible even with the cutting edge.

So for all of you that were thinking about making the switch to Firefox 3 and worried about all of your web apps working… rest assured that Mailroom will keep on truckin’.

While most of our audience knows how Mailroom can help you answer sales and support email from customers, few know of its political life. About 1 year ago, we had a client that represented a new segment of users. It was the Obama 2008 Campaign (Sproutit was an initial vendor). As they continued to grow in popularity, so did the sheer number of emails that were receiving from curious , individuals, voters, and supporters. Gray Brooks, the head of their email correspondence said:

This is my third major campaign and I have to say that I am very excited using Sproutit. It’s simply a big step forward from 4 years ago.

Here at Sproutit, we enjoy celebrating in the success that all of our clients, current and former, experience. As you already know, the Obama 2008 campaign faired rather well in the Iowa caucus last week. We hope in some small way, Sproutit Mailroom was able to lend a helping hand. And, we wish them well for today in New Hampshire. Good Luck!

If you know anyone running for public office, local, state or national, or already in office, let them know about Mailroom’s ability to help them connect better with their potential voters (even if they are Republicans, Democrats, or Independents).

If you have a Mac, get Fluid. When you run it, type in your Sproutit domain and name the app “Mailroom”. Fluid will create a native Mac application that you can launch just like Apple Mail, Safari or any other app, but this application will run Mailroom.

Apps like Mailroom work really well in this kind of environment. They honestly feel more at home this way than they do in a browser, IMO. I just tried this with the new version of Mailroom 3 we are working on and its even better.

Call it old fashioned, but we love featuring and talking about our clients. Our stance: helping others with their business is just good business.

This month, I am featuring JibJab, a company which I am sure many of you are familiar with.

Interviewer: Chris (that’s me)

Interviewee: Galen Foard

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What is JibJab? Where did the idea come from?

JibJab is a digital comedy studio founded by brothers Evan and Gregg Spiridellis in 1999. The company achieved international fame in 2004 with its political parodies, “This Land” and “Good to be in DC!,” which were seen more than 80 million times on every continent. The company was started as a result of a desire to distribute original, animated comedy content over the web.

Who are you and what do you do at JibJab?

As Operations, we are responsible for the administration of both the company and the website. Customer support is only a small portion of the job, however it is large enough that it involves the entire Operations team. Through customer support, we ensure the high standards of the company are upheld and the highest quality of customer support is given through email.

Why does JibJab use Mailroom? Don’t you just serve up free funny cartoon videos?

Although we do serve jokes, social greetings, and interactive greetings, we are also dedicated to maintaining a high standard toward quality. To provide high quality services such as JokeBox, Starring You! and Sendables, we want to help users enjoy the environment of JibJab. Not all users are computer experts and can fix their own problems on the site, so we like to see our users experience the best funniest stuff on the web every day by helping them solve issues they encounter on the site.

Does the support team at JibJab take on a certain ‘personality’ when responding to customers? Add humor to all emails? Straight laced?

As a humor-related site, we do keep a rather lax attitude in our emails, without exiting the realm of professionalism. We go by alternative names like “Nigel” to help us guarantee privacy of our employees and keep the feedback friendly. Many of our replies are geared toward relaxing the customer to make the exchange as pleasant as possible.

Why did JibJab choose to use Mailroom?

We needed a solution that would help us manage the thousands (literally) of emails we get each month, as running email operations through Outlook is painful. Mailroom helped us decrease the number of redundant issues that can easily be solved by looking at our FAQ, and it also helped make responses to emails more effective and efficient.

Is there anything new at JibJab? Planned for the new year?

In 2008 we are going to be producing more Starring You! videos, funny JibJab Sendables greetings and loads of election stuff!

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We were awestruck by the new Sendables that we decided to make a couple of our own for you. Consider it a gift for the season.

Snowball Fight

Minora Hora

Check out the Sproutit Snowball Fight

Also, read the Interview with JibJab.

Just a bit of fun to kick off the holidays.

Check out the Sproutit Minora Hora

Also, read the Interview with JibJab.

Peter, our customer support guru at Sproutit, recently interviewed Brian Ghidinelli or PukkaSoft, one of our clients and makers of MotorsportReg.com, about their experience with Mailroom and how it helps them with providing great customer support. Here's what we found out.

Peter: What you are doing?

Brian: MotorsportReg.com is an event management and registration service for motorsport event organizers. Whether it's wheel-to-wheel racing, high-performance driving schools or social events, we're the best system available for managing an event from start to finish. We have a wide range of customers from the SCCA, BMW Car Club of America, Audi Club of America, Porsche Club of America and other groups from all over the country who depend on us.

Peter: Why you got into doing this [the passionate version ;-)]

Brian: My favorite motorsports quote is by Peter Egan who said "Racing makes a heroin addiction seem like a vague longing for something salty". I started sliding down this slippery slope with a high-performance driving school in 2000 and within a couple of years I was volunteering with my local car club to earn a discount on entry fees.

What I found in the registration process was a bunch of overworked and under appreciated spreadsheet jockeys and paper pushers. I prototyped an online registration service for them and within a year I had a handful of customers around the country but I didn't think it was something I could make a living from.

In the past two years, however, adoption has skyrocketed and I feel like a celebrity when I talk to our customers. They love our application, they love our customer service and they constantly tell us that we're making them successful. That's what every product company wants to hear. That not only keeps me coming to the office excited but it keeps me awake at night thinking of new ways to make MotorsportReg.com even better.

Peter: What makes you unique (technology/service/product)?

Brian: In the big picture, our unique value is that we're a niche player with tools and domain expertise solving a problem exceptionally well. We're using our professional consulting backgrounds to convert customer problems into effective technology.

In our niche, we're the 500lb gorilla in the ring. Where most of our competition are part-time enthusiasts, we've built a business that allows us to operate a full-time company and invest more resources into our application, infrastructure and customer service. When these clubs want to trust their most critical operational system and money to a third party, we're the most professional and most reliable choice.

Technology wise (and excuse the techy-talk), we're very pragmatic. We use a lot of open source with Linux, Apache and PostgreSQL but our application server is Adobe ColdFusion because it's so fast to build robust applications. We use Dojo and jQuery in our UI and have a rapid development cycle with frequent releases all managed by Subversion and Trac.

Peter: How you are using Mailroom to help communicate with your customers?

Brian: Mailroom helps us primarily in three ways.

• The first is probably quite common: people ask the same question over and over and over. In our case as an ASP, we also receive inquiries that are intended for one of our customers. We used to manually type replies to these inquiries which would take at least an hour per day. With Mailroom, we speed through these questions in just a few minutes.
• The second is a subtle usability trick we've picked up. We periodically review the saved replies to see if there's something in the service itself that we could change to eliminate the inquiries. This process has led to several key changes that have reduced our inbound mail by more than 50%.
• The last is that it's much easier to synchronize who has answered what. Previously we used an email alias to handle inbound customer questions but we frequently replied multiple times. Customers love this level of attention but it wasn't a very effective use of our time! :)

So, not only can we fly through the email we do receive, but we're receiving a lot less of it because our approach to customer email is more methodical.

Peter: Anything else you would like to say? (new products/shout out to your hommies)

Brian: Well, we're looking forward to offering our customers Mailroom because they will benefit just like we have!