Show HN: Mailflo – Customer support right from Gmail

by nands • 12 years ago

63 18 12 years ago

instakill• 12 years ago

Hey.

You should consider changing your font color. The contrast is a little bit on the low side. Also the images you use on your help page are better than the ones on the landing page, maybe swap them around? Looks nice apart from that.

nirajr8• 12 years ago

Thanks for the input. Do try it out - I'm sure you'll find it useful.

nirajr8• 12 years ago

We took your advice and corrected both the contrast and the images. Many thanks for your inputs.

ad93611• 12 years ago

We use Mailflo for customer support at CallHub. Handling support and regular emails from within GMail is slick.

neev12• 12 years ago

How is this different from Streak?

nirajr8• 12 years ago

This is way simpler to use. With Mailflo, an email thread is a unit that you work around - by assigning it to a teammate, and by tracking its status. Thats how email customer support works in most cases.

We have been using Mailflo to do customer support for our other product GrexIt for a few weeks, and we know how effective this approach is. Do try it out.

neev12• 12 years ago

Sounds good.

Will give it a shot and come back.

All the best!

alooPotato• 12 years ago

Congrats on your launch!

As a founder of Streak, I'd love to know how we could be simpler/easier to use. If you have any suggestions or specific pain points, would love some feedback!

davidw• 12 years ago

How does something like this work? What's it get access to? How much does it depend on official or unofficial API's that may be killed at a moment's notice by Google?

Is it free? If so, how are you planning on paying for developing it?

Does it work ok with multiple Gmail accounts? Can I install it in a work one and not have its tentacles in my personal Gmail?

I ask because it looks really, really awesome for small, bootstrapped startups like what I work on over at LiberWriter. Small and simple and easy to use is exactly what I want.

nirajr8• 12 years ago

Hi, I'm Niraj, Founder, Mailflo. Answers to your questions below:

1. How it works is answered in detail here: https://mailflo.io/help#underthehood. Essentially, we use a browser extension to add labels in Gmail, and use our backend to sync labels across Gmail accounts over IMAP. Its based on what we built for our other product GrexIt (http://grexit.com), which is a very popular tool for Gmail.

It needs full IMAP access. And IMAP is enough for Mailflo to work. We do not use any unofficial or Google specific API.

2. Is it free: For now. And we'll always have a free plan. Very similar to what we have done for GrexIt.

3. It works great with multiple accounts (both with 'plain' Gmail and Google Apps accounts). The key motivation for us was to let teams collaborate on customer support by assigning tasks and looking at who is doing what.

Glad that you find it useful. Do try it out and let us know if you need any help.

wise_young_man• 12 years ago

This is a nice product! Congrats on making it. It really touches on some very important workflows for people and we are working in the same industry, but working on different problem areas. I think fresh out of the box thinking like this is what customer support needs.

I wanted to ask, how does the collaboration work? Does it share an email I get with my team or does it share the team email with me? I wasn't sure.

Also, your knowledge base is one really long page, any chance you would use an embedded widget for it? Let me know. We could exchange feedback too.

nirajr8• 12 years ago

Glad that you like it.

Everyone continues working out of their own Gmail/Google Apps accounts. You just use the Mailflo side bar on the left of an email to assign it to a team-mate, and the email pops up in the team-mate's inbox. Its detailed here: https://mailflo.io/help#howtouse

Would love to try an embedded widget for Mailflo, and for our other product http://grexit.com.

hemaljshah• 12 years ago

This is a fantastic tool for early stage start ups and companies who don't want to invest in expensive and unnecessary support tools in the bootstrap phase.

It would be great to add some aggregation or reporting on the side so you can understand your queue and how it's growing as well as provide tags or keywords to search on. Keep up the awesome work!

nirajr8• 12 years ago

Thanks. Reporting is coming very soon.

neonlex2• 12 years ago

How can I remove a project?

nirajr8• 12 years ago

Yes - you'll need to login at mailflo.io. We haven't added that functionality to the browser extension. Do note that deleting a project would not delete the associated emails and labels.

Just email us at support@mailflo.io if you need help.

neonlex2• 12 years ago

Thanks!

Show HN: Mailflo – Customer support right from Gmail

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