The evolution of shared email inboxes

Email has been widely used for online communication almost since the beginning of internet, and it’s probably one of the first accountd you created when started browsing.

Sure it started as something very similar to physical mail, but how did it evolve to shared email inboxes? Such a change, huh?

It’s been a long journey for email, and here is it’s history.

We have already share our view on how to share inbox with your team. But until that was possible the way it is today, email traversed a long evolution path. Let’s understand where this idea comes from.

👉 SHARE INBOX NOW 👈

The early email days

In the beginning, emails were just straight to the point. Messages had a sender and a receiver. That’s it.

You could, of course, add more people in the conversation by CC’ing and BCC’ing, but in the system logic, these were just many conversations between two people, copied over and over, creating endless threads.

Although today it seems awful and unpractical, we must acknowledge this start — we all start somewhere, after all — and learn from it.

When email was created in the 1970’s, people barely received email. Such a different reality than the current 269 billion emails exchanged daily in 2017.

Actually, many people still share email information this way. But, anyways…

The improvised “team inboxes”

However, for many others, some solutions appeared on the way. Let’s think a little bit: if you need many people to access the same messages, but you can’t share messages with multiple emails, what do you do?

Yes, you create a single email address and assign many people to it. Basically, everyone has the same password and access the same account (e.g. sales@company.com, help@company.com, etc).

In the beginning, it might sound practical, but besides its lack of security, when you start deeply thinking about it, you’ll see how it could go wrong. Here are a few examples:

– Miscommunication among team members: “messages could be answered by someone else, so I wouldn’t bother or I work faster than my peers, so I’ll stop working until they catch up”;

– Increasing time for an answer: “I think someone else started this conversation, so I won’t interfere”.

As much as these situations seem easily solvable, some teams fall apart because of them. It’s because of these issues that next steps were taken.

A big step: share inbox software

Ok, people realized that sharing the same account with 10 people is not a very good idea, so developers created specific softwares you can download to share your inbox.

That’s when products such as Front and Hiver appeared in the market. In a basic way, they offer platforms in which you’re able to share multiple inboxes with team members and collaborate with them, at the same time that you still have your own email.

DRAG!

And then we came! — you’re welcome.

Drag aims to be a tool that pushes this evolution forward. How do we do that? By combining many different technologies in one single place and still keeping it simple.

– Email? ✔️
– Shared inbox? ✔️
– Agile Kanban board? ✔️
– Turning email into dynamic tasks? ✔️
– Visually appealing interface? ✔️
– Need to use your email as a CRM with your team? No worries, ✔️
– Or maybe you use email as tickets in a Helpdesk? ✔️
– All of it integrated inside your inbox you already use? ✔️✔️✔️✔️✔️

👉 SHARE INBOX NOW 👈

What we did was to listen to client’s pain points in what concerned email, and then we tried to understand what kind of service would serve them in the best way.

So we don’t want to simply centralize emails into the same place. We want to centralize your team’s workflow, and do it in the place you spend most of your time: your Inbox.

Drag changes the game by making it as simple as they can be, so your tasks get into your email inbox because your emails become tasks.

Also, Kanban view makes it all more easily recognizable. By doing so, we allow your team to understand in what step is every aspect of work.

Besides that, shared inboxes are the next step of email, because they allow team members to collaborate and engage work much faster.

It’s quite usual to see our users taking hours, and even minutes, to do something that would usually take them days to do.

Conclusion

Shared inboxes work very well, and it’s your duty to find the most advanced and yet simple to use tool to your company.

The more you’re active about this, the most your company will make from this change. so don’t be afraid to challenge yourself and then feel the difference in productivity after your team collaborates more in a platform as simple and crucial as email.

What you’ll learn inside Drag

Starting now, we’re aiming to share what our plans are, how we’re doing and what lessons we’re learning along the way.

You’ll get:

• Just like this article, you’ll get real-time updates on what’s happening, what’s working and how it feels in a startup.
• Quick videos explaining quick wins and how to grow your business
• Live Instagram updates. Real-time stories of what’s happening

What now?

This is our attempt at sharing everything. It’s as simple as that You don’t have to be a customer to follow us.