Posted on April 10, 2008
Basecamp 'reply to email' review: they almost got it right
BY STEPAN MAZUROV
Basecamp, 37signals flagship product, rolled out a long awaited feature to their email update system. Now when you reply to email update message, it automatically posts it in corresponding thread. Man oh man, it sounded so sweet, yet once our clients started using it turned into a nightmare! Full review after the break.
It works great in theory, you get an update email that has very clear instructions on how to correctly reply:
--- Reply ABOVE THIS LINE to post a comment to the project ---
Company: Room 214
Project: Room 214
Link: https://room214.projectpath.com/P12538029Stepan Mazurov said:
...
And as long as people are careful not to include anything else above that line, basecamp has no issues displaying emails incorrectly, everyone on the thread gets a notification that reply has been posted, everything looks nice and threaded in Gmail. This is a huge plus for threaded clients (Gmail, thunderbird, etc) because before they would get confused as to which email was part of witch thread.
People that use Gmail will notice right away that mine and Ben's name are the same color, because they are coming from the same email address, while it isn't a huge blow, I'm used to identifying people by the color of their name rather than the name itself.
Another MAJOR issue that basecamp was quickly fixed was the inclusion of recent project history, which some people managed to get into their basecamp replies and pollute the e-waves with useless information. While we are on the subject of seeing random things in updates, it seems that some clients like to stick the signature before any of the old reply text. Its a good practice to ether get rid of anything that's not the direct message or make sure its written after the reply cut off.
My final concern is that people who like to get fancy with their replies, by ether cutting into the original message text (in case of Q & A for example), or by including their reply after the message will run into major problems and if they do not catch their mistake, the message will simply vanish. Hopefully they will be able to see the huge "Reply ABOVE THIS LINE" text and adjust their response accordingly.
Despite the inevitable shortcomings, its great to finally see this feature implemented because it is too often that we get a reply that does not reach its intended party and we later have to piece together the indented conversation.
