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?

Well, ready or not, here it comes. Introducing Mailroom 2.0, the fastest, easiest way to handle your sales and support email. Mailroom 2.0 is an all new application in many ways. We rewrote our entire interface as an advanced JavaScript application, which means it feels almost like you have a desktop application running in your web browser.

We’ve also made an incredible number of other number improvements. I’m going to post more about this later today, but for now I just want to say that this is the best version of Mailroom we’ve ever produced and I’m incredibly excited to finally get to share it with you. I think you are really going to love the changes we’ve made to this product.

Now, this new version of Mailroom has required some massive changes to the database that holds your email. We want to ensure the safety of your data, so we are bringing things back online in stages. Because of that, there are a couple of things I want you to know about the next few days:

First, we are bringing accounts back online one at a time as we get each of them upgraded. We are bringing paid accounts back online first and free accounts thereafter based on when you last logged in (so if you haven’t used your account in a while, it might be the afternoon before you have access again.) If you go to your account and it says you are still being upgraded, come back again in a few hours and try again. It will probably be available. We are doing this as fast as we can, I promise. We have over a million messages to go through through. It’s a big job.

Also, when you do get access to your account, we are upgrading some stats used for More About and the People page separately. So the conversation counts on these pages might be wrong for part of today. They should be back to normal by the end of the day, however. We could have waited until this was ready to activate your account, but we thought you would prefer to have your email.

Finally, we are expecting to receive a higher than normal level of traffic over the next few days. While we are going to do our best to keep your service as fast as possible, we really appreciate your patience as you have to share your server with some extra visitors. We will be adding resources and making improvements actively over the next few days to keep up with the demand as it hits us.

Mailroom 2.0 has been a long time in the making. In many ways, it is really the first realization of the vision we had for a polished, well designed business tool for small businesses when we started Sproutit two years ago. We think you’re going to love it and we would love to hear from you when you try it. Send us your raves and feedback at contact@sproutit.com and we’ll get right back to you. (Using Mailroom of course.)

Cheers, -Charles

I promised erwin a more in-depth look at what’s coming with MR2 within a week or two. That was a few days ago, so now here it is: The first public demonstration of Mailroom 2, coming in January from Sproutit:

It’s not very flashy. I did something quick so I could actually get it out to you and get back to the project. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it though (especially if you are excited about the updates. ;-)

Cheers!

Speed has always been one of the most important areas for Mailroom. Our goal is to help you get through your email as fast as possible so you can get onto other things. We’ve been making steady improvements in this area since our launch and this next release will be no exception.

Well, its been a long time coming, but we finally rolled out attachments support for Mailroom last Friday! We’ve been testing it this weekend, and so far things seem to be working great. If you’ve been waiting on attachments to give Mailroom a try, now is a great time to give it another go.

In addition to attachments, we’ve also made some other major upgrades to Mailroom in the last few weeks. Our latest deployment adds forwarding to the Cc and Bcc support we added a month ago. We also moved Mailroom to new servers, sped up the UI, reduced the time it takes to receive new email to under a minute (for emails sent directly to Mailroom), and made some massive improvements to our spam filter.

We’re really glad to have these features finally out, and especially excited to get started on our next round of improvements. We have some new things planned with our UI, suggested replies, and assignment features that I think you are going to love.

Special thanks to Shanti, Peter, and Rob (at OCS Solutions) for all the hard work you put into making these changes the last few months. This has been a big project.

As always, thanks everyone for your tremendous support. We are anxious to hear your thoughts on our recent improvements. Please give it a try and drop us a line anytime.

Isaac Garcia at CentralDesktop writes about Why Email is still the most adopted collaboration tool. It’s an interesting (though very long) post from someone making a competitor to email in the form of a hosted collaboration tool.

We use both wikis (a collaboration tool) and email (with Mailroom of course) here at Sproutit. Of course, we bring all of it together using feeds and feed readers.

Charles’s post on MoreAbout points up an interesting question in this new “Web 2.0” world. As more and more services and tools to share information come on the scene, privacy starts to become an issue.

We blog, or post comments to blogs or contribute to forums or bulletin boards. What we write is thereupon indexed by services like Technorati. We attach a feed to our site, share photographs (with a service like Flickr), or audio or video. We leave signed reviews on Amazon or IMDB. Each time we take any of these actions, we share information about ourselves with the public. Because oftentimes when we use these services we seem to be alone, we are sometimes surprised to find out that, in reality, we have been engaged in publishing, and we have publish information that under other circumstances we would never consciously divulge.

Our anonymity starts to dissolve, to be replaced, if not with our real selves, at least with a persona who has our name and shares our email address and many other bits of information we had previously considered private, or at most, belonging only to ourselves and a certain designated recipient or recipients.

Now, the reason I’m discoursing on this is not to indulge in some amateur sociology. It’s a direct response to Charles’s announcement of MoreAbout. With MoreAbout, we are bringing together information on your email history with the recipient, your work history with the recipient using Basecamp and your photo. None of these three pieces of information can be said to be accidental. When you send a Mailroom user an email, you mean to (presumably). It’s very hard to accidentally collaborate on a project with a fellow Basecamp user. And as far as I can tell it is thoroughly impossible to upload a photo or image to Gravatar if you really don’t want to.

But, what if we brought together additional information into the MoreAbout function? What if your recent blog posts, your recent comments online, tags from Technorati, reviews from Amazon and IMDB and other freely available but not as yet consolidated information were also offered up to any Mailroom user you sent an email to? (Conversely, as a Mailroom user the same information would be available to you about others who write in to you via your Mailroom account?)

On the one hand, as a you could really get a great idea who the person was who was writing you; you could sell or serve or work with this person better because you know more about him or her as a person. As a sender, you could count on better service or cooperation and, on the personal side, you would achieve that human connection that is frequently the motivation for providing that information, for sticking yourself out there, in the first place.

On the other hand, although this information was not extorted from you, perhaps you did not realize how having it all brought together in one place and provided to another person would make you feel. Perhaps it would feel like an invasion of privacy, in spirit if not in fact.

Although we do not currently have any plans to add this sort of information to MoreAbout, it is a possibility. It seems like it could be a tremendously useful innovation. But it seems fraught as well. So instead of guessing and either taking an informed chance that you’d like it and finding out later that you hated it, or making an equally uninformed guess that you’d hate it and never finding out that you would have loved using it, we’re just going to ask you to join the discussion.

Would the addition of Web-wide information about a sender to the MoreAbout function on Mailroom be a good idea or a bad one? How useful would it be? Would anyone’s privacy be illegitimately invaded? If so, would an “opt out” take care of that issue or would it just be a band-aid on a bullet hole?

Rest assured, we can’t be the only ones who have thought of this. Someone is going to start putting this information together. Maybe they already have. But whether we’re developers or customers, senders or receivers, business people or customers, we’re going to have to do what we’ve done countless times in our history. We’re going to have to define for ourselves what is public and what is private. If we don’t, someone else will do it for us. And I don’t like the sound of that.

Have you ever had that experience where every time you email a company, they act like it’s the first time they’ve ever heard of you? It’s especially frustrating when you have a technical issue to resolve and you have to re-explain your problem every single time you contact the company.

This happens because most business have a problem of context. They receive so many emails that they can’t possibly remember everyone. After a while, every message seems to come from just another faceless user. We wanted to help with that and that’s why today I am excited to announce a new feature we’ve just deployed called “More About”.

Anytime a customer writes you an email, it is a gift. An enormous gift. And the sad thing is, most companies just throw it away.

Think about the type of person who sends feedback email to companies: This person cares enough about you and your company to form an opinion about you. They are also vocal enough to want share their opinion with others once they have formed it.

In other words, anyone who sends you an email is a prime candidate to become a passionate user. One of those all important customers who will tell everyone else they know about you, if only you can get them to become passionate enough about your product or service.

What’s more, by sending you an email, this person has given you an opportunity to change them from an interested opinionated person into a passionate user. All you need to do is write them back.

People become passionate about something when they form a personal connection with it somehow. And, there is no better way to form a personal connection with a person than to become friends with them. It’s amazing but true: a simple, personal, authentic note from someone at your company is often all it takes to convince someone that you are “good people” and worth their time.

So if simply writing back can do so much for your business, why do so throw this tremendous opportunity away?

It’s quite simple, really: many companies view email as a support cost rather than a sales tool. It’s easy to understand this attitude when you think about the hundreds of emails even a small business can receive everyday. Complaint, questions, comments. It’s hard to imagine sometimes how all of this work can really help close a sale.

To really get the most out of your customer email, you have to begin by thinking about it as part of your marketing, not your support costs. Like any other marketing program, you have to be prepared to invest a little time and money into it. Most importantly, you have to develop a system to help you get through it.

For starters, you can get some technology to help you. Mailroom is designed for this very thing. Mailroom makes it easy for your entire group to share your incoming customer email. It can also save you time by suggesting replies based on your past responses.

Even with technology, though, your email will always need a little human touch. Be sure to budget ample time for someone on your team to devote to answering your email. Better yet, have everyone pitch in so no one has to answer too many emails. Not only will that keep everyone in your business closer to your customers, it will keep allow each email to get the time it deserves.

However you do it, remember: if you want to create passionate users, you can start simply by answering your email. Make it a priority. Treat your email like a sales tool. You will be amazed at how many of those people you connect with will return the favor by bringing many more customers to your door.

The International Herald Tribune had an interesting article about the theme of the upcoming CeBIT conference:

Throughout the week in Hannover, Germany, companies at the world’s most highly attended tech trade fair will pitch their latest and greatest communications wares at Cebit. But to hear it from some of Germany’s largest companies, the killer application for interoffice communications, from the boardroom to the mailroom, is – drum roll, please – e-mail. (from E-mail: Still a killer app? – Technology – International Herald Tribune)

The article goes on to say that for all the talk of IMs, RSS, Blogs, and Podcasts, Email is still the biggest way people use the web. This is why it is so important for you to be able to connect with your customers effectively using Email. Do a newsletter (we are working on ours…), offer your blog by email using Rssfwd, and use Mailroom is provide your customers prompt, personal responses.

Earlier this week we hired Dan Munzert to help us around the office here in Prague. He’s a great guy who’s going to do a lot of things for us, including helping out with support.

Thankfully, we were way ahead when it came to support because we are using Mailroom. Simply by giving him an account, Dan can access and send all the of the replies we normally use for support. He can also find out every communication we’ve ever had with a customer in just two clicks. Mailroom even helps him dig into all of this information by suggesting replies and assigning emails for him.

It’s amazing how much less training you have to do when so much of the knowledge you need to do the job is available and organized in Mailroom.

How are you using Mailroom? Drop me a line if you want to talk about it, and maybe we can do an interview blog post about you and your company.