This week is “Clean out your inbox week” – the seventh year such a week has been observed. A sign of the times not only that clogged inboxes are so commonplace that people need to be rallied to clean them, but also that the task gets honoured with a whole week!
Not many people would argue that cleaning up their inbox is a good idea, and most would agree it’s a tough ask due to the sheer volume of email that arrives daily. The trickier question, which would probably leave most people wondering, is how exactly to clean inboxes out without losing important information that is likely to be needed some time in the future. Where should you put them – into an archive? into a hierarchy of folders within your mailbox? into the file system somewhere?
It’s easy to frame this as a question for individuals, and answer it in terms of what works best for the user when it comes to retrieving the emails. But in an organisational context, there must be a better approach. Emails, after all, are the bread-and-butter of interactions between an organisation and its customers, suppliers, and other partners. They contain key information relating to agreements, commitments, clarifications, and decisions – and this information belongs to the organisation. Shouldn’t it be accessible to team members so it can be discovered, reviewed, checked, and actioned? Shouldn’t it be searchable, so that anyone working on a particular project can retrieve any email relevant to the project?
Is this what your inbox feels like?
We’ve designed Soup Mail to achieve exactly these things. Soup Mail provides a common repository where people can save emails to team folders, outside of their inbox. So you can have it all: a clean inbox, and easy searchable access to the emails – not only those you were party to, but the full history of emails for each project. Check us out, and sign up for a free trial account, at www.soupmail.com.
– Euan
Email processing delay
Firstly, our apologies to the users who were affected by the processing delay today. What was scheduled to be a routine maintenance release turned out to coincide with the spawning of thousands of surplus background jobs which were holding up the email processing queue. This resulted in it taking longer than usual for emails to be visible in Soup Mail. Fortunately the release today has addressed those issues and normal operation has been restored and improved.
Metro-ised
We recently updated the Soup Mail iPhone app to align the styling with iOS 7 and ever since we just haven’t been able to look back. Therefore, with today’s release we have overhauled the styling of the Soup Mail web interface and replaced all the icons and buttons with their metro-ised equivalents. It has been a subtle change in some respects, but sometimes those are the best kind of changes.
Under the hood
With this release we have implemented a number of new features and infrastructure upgrades to better support the needs of our large enterprise and government customers. While not yet exposed in the interface the foundation is now in place for improved enterprise administration of Soup Mail.
Key enhancements
- Folder owners can now edit tags on emails
- Sync now fully supports saving meeting requests/acceptance
- Emails reporting hidden sender are now accepted
- Emails with attachments that have no file name now show attachment icon
- Creating/editing folders now removes leading or trailing spaces
- Emails that fail validation are now moved into the –Sync issues folder in your mailbox
- Additional help provided when connecting/updating your mailbox sync settings
- You can now use the up and down key to jump to global search results
We have done a lot of optimisations in the background of sync in this release to handle emails with ‘strange’ headers/properties and for mail servers that respond with non-standard responses. We’ve also implemented a number of security enhancements that streamline our patching processes.
We released a hotfix today to address an issue that was causing multiples of the same email to appear in users mailbox sync folders for particular emails. While there was only one copy of the email in Soup Mail, it was sometimes appearing multiple times in the users sync folder in their mailbox. This was impacting some users who are syncing to Exchange 2003 servers over IMAP, because it was occasionally reporting malformed message-IDs.
The hotfix has resolved this issue, however, you will need to manually delete the duplicate from your mailbox if you have been impacted. Otherwise you can happily ignore the duplicates and sync will clean them up after they pass your recency window defined in your Soup Mail sync settings.
Important: Outlook Add-in update required
Please click the link below to download and install the latest Outlook Add-in, you will be required to restart Outlook after the install.
Key enhancements
- Added the ability (for team admins) to update tags on emails (use the pencil icon at the right hand side of the mail preview).
- Favouriting a folder now immediately queues creation of the folder in your mailbox (no more waiting for the next sync for it to appear in your mailbox).
- You can now download the Outlook Add-in directly from the login screen and getting started links.
- The add/edit folder screen has been updated and now maintains the scroll position on the page.
- Sync has been further optimised to better handle very large emails on mail servers with slow connections.
- The search index has been optimised to handle on-boarding scenarios that previously required a team to be re-indexed.
Other enhancements
- Updated edit folder screen to search on email address and user name when adding a new sharee.
- Updated mail preview to handle emails with non-standard CSS styling.
- Updated mail preview to show place-holders for insecure content.
- Updated mail preview to enable clickable email addresses.
- Updated sync to handle emails with non-standard encoding.
- Over a dozen other platform, security and performance updates.
Soup Mail is now back online after the 1.2 update!
Sync is playing catchup to process all the emails saved during the update process. But will be back to firing on all cylinders by tomorrow morning.
As always, send us a mail at support@soupmail.com if you have any questions.
New/enhanced user features
Folder sortability
This has been our most requested feature and we are excited to announce that you can now sort on any of the columns on the folder page to help you browse your folder list much more easily. You can also go straight to your favourites by clicking the ‘star’ icon. We have kept the default sort to the Updated column so that all your folders with recent activity are still at the top.
Tool tips and icons
We value simplicity, and we know much a little bit of information can help the new users on your team. Here is a small selection of the new juicy icons and tips you’ll find as you move around the app.
There is more to come and in particular we will be providing more help on the Mailbox connect page in the future because we know that is the most complicated part of the Soup Mail on boarding experience.
Sync is smarter and faster
The team has made a number of improvements to sync which means it is now faster and smarter. We have full support for mailboxes using IMAP prefixes to help out those advanced GMAIL and IMAP mailbox users. When connecting your mailbox to Soup Mail you’ll notice that it will create the Soup Mail folder immediately and also give you feedback if it failed to connect because your username or password was incorrect – this should save you having to dig into the advanced settings if you just mistyped your username or password.
Show remote content
You will notice a new banner at the top of the mail preview when the content of the email contains links to remote sites or non-secure (non https) resources. You will need to click the “Show Remote Content” link to display the remote content (typically images). We have done this to help protect your privacy.
Delete is back
You can now delete emails from Soup Mail again. For those earlier adopters, you will remember you could originally do this but sync was putting them back in when it discovered the emails in another user’s sync folder. Well, sync is now much smarter (and faster) and you can now happily delete emails from Soup Mail, just click “X Delete email” when previewing an email.
Under the hood
- Additional duplicate email checking
- Support IMAP mailboxes with prefix
- Increased security
With the Soup Mail Add-In file your emails with one click from Microsoft Outlook.
Go get the latest version of the Soup Mail Add-In for Microsoft Office Outlook!
Today we’re really excited to announce the release of Soup Mail for iOS. With just a tap, you’ll be able to scroll through your team emails anywhere you are!
Available for iPhone & iPad
On the iPad you can manage your team, create folders and everything else you could expect to do in Soup Mail. You can get your email filing sorted and have your entire team’s emails on hand whenever you need it. On the iPhone you can find those emails you need follow up quickly and browse your folders.
Go get the latest version of Soup Mail for iOS!
New/enhanced user features
- Minor bug fixes and interface improvements
- Fix folder search bug on folders page that was ignoring 4th character on keyword
- The full folder name is now shown when descriptions are enabled on folders page (helpful when you have very long folder names)
- When adding team members, you don’t have to Save changes, instead all changes apply immediately
Outlook Add-In
- Minor bug fixes and improvements