StartupSquad at Wordpress

SocialMail has an interesting proposition of integrating email and discussion groups at one place to provide an collaborative platform that can cut down the number of emails we send and receive. SocialMail launched its beta couple of weeks back and is developed by AppMail which is lead by Ankesh Kumar based out of Palo Alto, CA, and has Rajiv Dutta, President of Skype, on its advisory board. SocialMail branches out of the enterprise products being offered by AppMail for the past few years including DASH, CARE, Recruit.

Using SocialMail users can easily and effectively manage their events and information at a central location instead of getting buried down under hundreds of email anytime you organize an event. Consider a case where you want to get feedback from your users regarding addition of new features to your product. Using SocialMail you can easily create your Feedback message, add questions you want to ask, and send out the email either to groups created by you or individual people. SocialMail provides exhaustive set of options to create a targeted message before you email it out. You can either pickup a template with it’s associated questions or add your own questions as part of the email. You can also set at what time the Feedback email gets sent out, set reminders for people who haven’t replied, set the repeat status for the Feedback email, let the group member see answers to your questions, create discussion board for the topic, attach files, and set how many and how often you want to get the replies in your email for the topic sent by you.

Users receiving the Feedback email don’t need to register at SocialMail in order to reply to your message. They can just click to reply when they receive your message and they will be taken to a form where they can respond, post, and chat with others. All responses from your users keep getting updated at the topic page on your SocialMail account. SocialMail also enables you to continue further discussion with select users which will not be visible to others. From the topic page you can easily add and remove recipients, modify group list settings/reminder date,  export the messages to a excel file, and get RSS feed for the messages in the topic. One of really nice features I found at SocialMail is that besides exchanging messages for a topic, you can also have discussions for each topic, which makes your communication and collaboration much more effective. Another  good  feature is that you can run a report to get the initial message, aggregated responses, and discussion details, all on one page. As for adding users to your SocialMail account, you can either create new contacts, or upload contacts from their Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail, and AOL accounts address books or simply upload using a CSV file.

What I really like about SocialMail though is number of situations it can be used and be really helpful. You can easily create surveys, feedback forms, organize events, discuss topics, and perform similar things which are not easily possible using regular email. Actually SocialMail encompasses several applications in once place which in my opinion include Email+ Event Organizer + Discussion Board +  Newsletter Service +  Mailman like email delivery settings. I think SocialMail would definitely get a good user response when it launches officially at the start of next year.

Links:
SocialMail
AppMail