Orange is my favorite color

Since they launched, I’ve used Mailroom to handle customer support email for my company. Mailroom is awesome because it learns your replies and automatically suggests them to future inquiries. After a couple of major upgrades and some mismanagement on our part, the service had broken down for us and we went back to the manual method of replying to each email.

I missed that automation so yesterday I decided to start fresh with their 2.0 product and learned a couple of tricks with help from Charles:

  1. Personalized Responses – in the FAQ, SproutIt explains you can insert tags to address your recipient by name with %RECIPIENT_FIRST% and %RECIPIENT_LAST%. But you can also sign your email with %SENDER_FIRST% and %SENDER_LAST% which picks up on your user information. This is useful if you have more than one person answering emails.
  2. Tag Grouping – We were creating long and somewhat unwieldy tag names like QuestionForOrganizer or RefundsAndCancellations. If you create your tags with a colon like organizer:Question or attendee:Cancellation, the pop-up tag selector will create groups so that everything prefixed with “organizer” is in one section and everything prefixed with “attendee” is in another. This makes finding and selecting the appropriate tag faster. I wish tags would retain their mixed case for readability and have requested an enhancement.

Do you have any Mailroom tips? If you haven’t used Mailroom and find yourself replying to similar inquiries repeatedly, you definitely should try it out. They have free and $10/mo accounts making it very startup and entrepreneur friendly. It would also be good for people who run small open source or free software projects.

3 Comments

  1. Shanti Braford said:

    on July 25, 2007 at 10:32 pm

    Brian – glad you are enjoying Mailroom!

    Some of those features are hard to get 100% perfect; they take a bit of training / setup before they are super-useful.

    Do you still live in SF?

    Cheers!

  2. brian said:

    on July 26, 2007 at 7:28 am

    I’m subletting in Berkeley at the moment; I returned about 6 weeks ago from my round-the-world trip and my girlfriend took a job in Sunnyvale so we are moving south to Los Gatos. We both love the city but hate commuting so it’s a trade off for now since I work from home. I spent about 10 years in Potrero and SOMA in a combination of apartments and live/work loft-offices and it is a great place!

  3. Shanti said:

    on July 26, 2007 at 10:39 am

    Brian – I’m jealous, dude! I would love to go on a trip like that one day.

    I have some friends down in Sunnyvale but only get down there every once in a while for a party or event.

    SOMA is the bomb (where I work) but Civic Center area is definitely full of some shady elements ;) But it’s all good, fun city-living.

{ RSS feed for comments on this post}